30 January 2022

Week 2022-04: Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina] - Collected Quotes

"Absence of understanding does not warrant absence of existence." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina]) 

"Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina])

"Cultivate the self with learning in order to progress and leave all else; for knowledge is an abode of all things. 
The self is like glass, the knowledge, like a lamp, and the wisdom of God, like oil. 
When your self is illuminated - you are alive, and when there is darkness - you are dead." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina])

"Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina])

"Further, this power which conceives these ideas does at times gain from sense forms mental, imaginative, and innate in (instinctive to) itself; and in such a case it does this in that it lays before itself the forms that are in the conceiving power and in the remembering (preserving) power, by employing the imaginative and the conjecturing power, and then contemplates them, and finds them to have participated in some forms and to have differed in some other forms; and finds some amongst the forms that are in these powers to be essential and others to be accidental." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina])

"God is knowledge; he is knowing; and he is being known. Since God has knowledge of his own essence, and since God is one, it follows that the essence of God is knowledge. And knowledge means that he knows himself, and is known by himself." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina], "al-Risalat al-Arshiya")

"It is evident that everything which does not exist at first and then exists, is determined by something other than itself." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina])

"Medicine deals with the states of health and disease in the human body. It is a truism of philosophy that a complete knowledge of a thing can only be obtained by elucidating its causes and antecedents, provided, of course, such causes exist. In medicine it is, therefore, necessary that causes of both health and disease should be determined." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina]) 

"Now it is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina]) 

"Pain is a sensation produced by something contrary to the course of nature and this sensation is set up by one of two circumstances: either a very sudden change of the temperament (or the bad effect of a contrary temperament) or a solution of continuity." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina]) 

"Prayer is that which enables the soul to realize its divinity. Through prayer human beings worship absolute truth, and seek an eternal reward. Prayer is the foundation-stone of religion; and religion is the means by which the soul is purified of all that pollutes it. Prayer is the worship of the first cause of all things, the supreme ruler of all the world, the source of all strength. Prayer is the adoration of the one whose being is necessary." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina], "Kitab al-Najat")

"The different sorts of madness are innumerable." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina]) 

"The mind (Understanding, Reason) is in fact and deed wholly and solely nothing else than the forms of mentally-grasped things, if these be arrayed in the very mind potentially, and through it they are brought out to effective action; and hence it is said that the mind is in fact and deed at once both understanding and understood. Amongst the properties of the understanding power is this, that it unifies the many and multiplies the one through analysis and synthesis. As to multiplication, it is such as the analysis of one man into essence, body, nourishment-getting, animal, speaking (rational). As to unification of the many, it is such as the composition (synthesis) of this one man out of essence, body, animal, speaking (rational) into one notion which is mankind (human being)."(Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina])
 
"The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina]) 

"When knowledge reaches the specific natures and what is accidental to them, inquiry stops and is not followed by the fleeting knowledge of individuals to which our souls are not at all inclined." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina], "The Physics of The Healing", cca. 1014)

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