Quote by Ibn Tufayl: “The person who knows only what others have told them does not truly know.”

Receiving information from others is a starting point, not the destination. Real knowledge requires that you test ideas against your own experience and reasoning — otherwise you have inherited someone else's conclusions without actually understanding them.

Ibn Tufayl wrote Hayy ibn Yaqzan in Andalusia during the Almohad period, when religious orthodoxy was restricting philosophical inquiry. By setting his story on a deserted island, he could explore free rational inquiry without directly challenging religious authorities.

Andalusian philosopher and physician born around 1105 in Guadix in present-day Spain, best known for the philosophical novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan — the first philosophical novel in world literature — which explores how a person raised alone on an island could arrive at truth through pure reason.