Top 40 Lesley Hazleton Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Everything is paradox. The danger is one-dimensional thinking.”

— Lesley Hazleton

2. “I’m always asking questions – not to find ‘answers,’ but to see where the questions lead. Dead ends sometimes? That’s fine. New directions? Interesting. Great insights? Over-ambitious. A glimpse here and there? Perfect.”

— Lesley Hazleton

3. “There is no perfect solution to depression, nor should there be. And odd as this may sound we should be glad of that. It keeps us human.”

— Lesley Hazleton

4. “Man journeys in darkness, and his destiny journeys toward him,” he said, and traveled on.”

— Lesley Hazleton

5. “Suffering, once accepted, loses its edge, for the terror of it lessens, and what remains is generally far more manageable than we had imagined.”

— Lesley Hazleton

6. “So when dogmatic atheists assume that science has all the answers, or imagine that it soon will, they are no more immune than the most literal religious fundamentalist to the deceptive enchantment of certainty.”

— Lesley Hazleton

7. “Al-Tabari understood that human truth is always flawed – that realities are multiple and that everyone has some degree of bias. The closest one might come to objectivity would be in the aggregate, which is why he so often concludes a disputed episode with that time-honored phrase “Only God knows for sure.”

— Lesley Hazleton

8. “The word, ‘cube’, comes directly from the Arabic, Kaaba.”

— Lesley Hazleton

9. “Machiavelli himself famously put it: “All armed prophets have conquered, and unarmed prophets have come to grief.”9.”

— Lesley Hazleton

10. “If there was a single moment it all began, it was that of Muhammad’s death. Even the Prophet was mortal. That was the problem. It was as though nobody had considered the possibility that he might die, not even Muhammad himself.”

— Lesley Hazleton

11. “Khadija loved him for himself, not for who he would become, and he would never forget her in those later years, turning pale with grief at the sound of any voice that reminded.”

— Lesley Hazleton

12. “If Muhammad weren’t standing lonely vigil on the mountain, you might say that there was no sign of anything unusual about him.”

— Lesley Hazleton

13. “Whether you think the words he heard came from inside himself or from outside, it is clear that Muhammad experienced them, and with a force that would shatter his sense of himself and his world.”

— Lesley Hazleton

14. “The great British philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood maintained in The Idea of History that to write well about a historical figure, you need both empathy and imagination. By this he did not mean spinning tales out of thin air, but taking what is known and examining it in the full context of time and place, following the strands of the story until they begin to intertwine and establish a thick braid of reality.”

— Lesley Hazleton

15. “What does one dream of when the dream has been achieved?”

— Lesley Hazleton

16. “All ancient polytheisms revered one high god above all others.”

— Lesley Hazleton

17. “But raw numbers can be misleading. In the Middle East heartland of Islam, the Shia are closer to fifty percent, and wherever oil reserves are richest – Iran, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf coast, including eastern Saudi Arabia – they are in the majority.”

— Lesley Hazleton

18. “The cohesiveness and spirit of the community of believers attracted an increasing number of helpers, who would soon outnumber the emigrants. Their requests for guidance rose commensurately, and the revelations began to direct Muhammad on everything from times of prayer to tithing to resolution of marital disputes.”

— Lesley Hazleton

19. “Female infanticide was as high in Mecca as in Constantinople, Athens, and Rome – a practice the Quran was to address directly and condemn repeatedly.”

— Lesley Hazleton

20. “There was no god but God. There could be no partners with God, no daughters or sons. God was neither begotten nor begetter. What indeed had.”

— Lesley Hazleton

21. “The boy who had survived by blending into the background had to accept that he would now be thrust into the foreground, into the unrelenting eye of the world.”

— Lesley Hazleton

22. “Muhammad’s is one of those rare lives that is more dramatic in reality than in legend. In fact the less one invokes the miraculous, the more extraordinary his life becomes.”

— Lesley Hazleton

23. “Arabia would not exert political power again for more than a thousand years, until the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect emerged from the central highlands in the eighteenth century to carry out violent raids against Shia shrines in Iraq and even against the holy places of Mecca and Medina.”

— Lesley Hazleton

24. “Treated by his own people as one of them yet not one of them, he couldn’t help but be aware of the contradictions inherent in a society that was supposed to be his, but seemed to have no place for him.”

— Lesley Hazleton

25. “In more metaphysical terms, it becomes a safe place in which one sleeps, dreams, and grows before emerging back into the world. Either way, it’s a place not merely of shelter, but of incubation.”

— Lesley Hazleton

26. “A boy who had learned to survive by silencing his voice had suddenly been given one, but was it his own voice he had been given, or the voice of God? Or was the voice of God within him, part of him? Had divine words really been planted inside him, or had his own words been an expression of the divine? Where did man end and God begin? What was this boundary so powerfully and briefly broken?”

— Lesley Hazleton

27. “Yet the greater the turmoil inside him, the more the revelations responded to it. It was as though the Quranic voice was able to see deep inside him and address questions he was barely aware he was asking.”

— Lesley Hazleton

28. “If you believe in Omens, the fact that Muhammad was born an orphan is not a good one.”

— Lesley Hazleton

29. “How did the infant sent away from his family grow up to redefine the whole concept of family and tribe into something far larger: the umma, the people or the community of Islam?”

— Lesley Hazleton

30. “Muhammad now translated this concept into political terms. Blending idealism and pragmatism – a master politician’s skill if ever there was one – he drew up arbitration agreement that used the tribal principle to reach beyond tribe.”

— Lesley Hazleton

31. “In fact radically different versions of many of the biblical tales can still be heard today throughout the region, where what seems ‘wrong’ to Western ears is accepted as part of the lore of the Eastern churches.”

— Lesley Hazleton

32. “Those who are comfortably established in life tend to have no need to ask what it means.”

— Lesley Hazleton

33. “The scriptures of all three of the great monotheisms show that they began similarly as popular movements in protest against the privilege and arrogance of power, whether that of kings as in the Hebrew bible, or the Roman Empire as in the Gospels, or a tribal elite as in the Quran. All three, that is, were originally driven by ideals of justice and egalitarianism, rejecting the inequities of human power in favor of a higher and more just one.”

— Lesley Hazleton

34. “Because prophetic it definitely was, placing itself explicitly in the tradition of previous prophets from Moses down through the ages to Jesus. “Say: ‘We believe in God and in that which has been revealed to us; in what was revealed to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the tribes of Israel; to Moses and Jesus and the other prophets.”

— Lesley Hazleton

35. “Why would a happily married man isolate himself this way, standing in meditation through the night?”

— Lesley Hazleton

36. “Those who are in federation with them” specifically included not only all the clans of the Aws and the Khazraj, whether or not they had formally accepted islam at that point, but also the Jewish tribes, named clan by clan. As monotheists, “the Jews are one community with the believers,” the document declared, again using the word umma. “Each must help the other against anyone who attacks the people of this document. They must seek mutual advice and consultation.”

— Lesley Hazleton

37. “As with early Judaism and early Christianity, early Islam would be rooted in opposition to a corrupt status quo.”

— Lesley Hazleton

38. “In a sense Muhammad was less the messenger than the translator, struggling to give human form – words – to the ineffable.”

— Lesley Hazleton

39. “All three, that is, were originally driven by ideals of justice and egalitarianism, rejecting the inequities of human power in favor of a higher and more just one. No matter how far they might have strayed from their origins as they became institutionalized over time, the historical record clearly indicates that what we now call the drive for social justice was the idealistic underpinning of monotheistic faith.”

— Lesley Hazleton

40. “The parallels between Muhammad and Jesus are striking. Both were impelled by a strong sense of social justice; both emphasized unmediated access to the divine; both challenged the established power structure of their times.”

— Lesley Hazleton

41. “Spiritual but not religious” is an expression of a very human yearning for an opening of mind and heart – a sense of soul and spirit that enhances day-to-day experience instead of tamping it down and channeling it into the narrow confines of stick-and-carrot orthodoxy. It’s a rejection of traditional tenets and pieties, of doctrine and dogma and judgment. It resists the usual attempts to pigeonhole, saying, “Spare me your labels.” It is, at heart, agnostic. –.”

— Lesley Hazleton

42. “This is the basic insight of the Gnostics, the one known to the great mystical thinkers of all traditions: the divine spark is within each human being.”

— Lesley Hazleton