Whether they're novelists, poets or scholars, great writers have the ability to see through the human experience and express it in a way like no other.

Through their expression, they make us understand the nature of ourselves and the world around us, an ability that the Arab World's greatest writers certainly possessed.

From Lebanon's icons such as Khalil Gibran and Mikhail Na'ima to Syria's Nizar Qabbani and Egypt's Naguib Mahfouz, the Arab greats knew how to put their own unique perspectives into words and have them convey meanings that are universal.

These are 10 incredible quotes about the universal experience of love, from some of the greatest Arab writers of all time.

1. "Love is the law of God. You live that you may learn to love. You love that you may learn to live. No other lesson is required of Man." - Mikhail Na'imy

2. "But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love, let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls." - Kahlil Gibran

3. “Had I told the sea what I felt for you, it would have left its shores, its shells, its fish, and followed me.” - Nizar Qabbani

4. "Love, it surrounds every being and extends slowly to embrace all that shall be." - Kahlil Gibran

5. "As for life's tragedies, our love will defeat them. Love is the most effective cure. In the crevices of disasters, happiness lies like a diamond in a mind, so let us instill in ourselves the wisdom of love." - Naguib Mahfouz

6. "If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don't, they never were." - Kahlil Gibran

7. "Your love taught me how love changes the map of time. It taught me that when I love, the Earth stops spinning." - Nizar Qabbani

8. "In the lakes of light, love and will, I would baptize all mankind." - Ameen Rihani

9. "There is who loves you quietly, and respects you quietly, and wishes you privately, and walks away when he sees you busy with someone other than him, and his ego restrains him from getting near you, and contents himself with the love for the sake of love." - Nizar Qabbani

10. "Oh lord, nourish me not with love, but with the desire for love." - Ibn Arabi