A Comparison.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
The Rubaiyat (1120)
The Divine Milieu, p. 128
The Divine Milieu (1960)
“I am born into an environment — I know not whence I came nor whither I go nor who I am.”
Science and Humanism (1951)
Context: I am born into an environment — I know not whence I came nor whither I go nor who I am. This is my situation as yours, every single one of you. The fact that everyone always was in this same situation, and always will be, tells me nothing. Our burning question as to the whence and whither — all we can ourselves observe about it is the present environment. That is why we are eager to find out about it as much as we can. That is science, learning, knowledge; it is the true source of every spiritual endeavour of man. We try to find out as much as we can about the spatial and temporal surroundings of the place in which we find ourselves put by birth…
When I wander away with Death.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Quoted in Ruysbroeck the Admirable (1925) by Alfred Wautier d'Aygalliers and Fred Rothwell, p. 175
“No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going.”
Statement to Pomponne de Bellievre, as told to Cardinal de Retz in 1651; Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz (1717) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3846/3846.txt
Variant: One never rises so high as when one does not know where one is going.
“If men must beg to live,
May the Creator also go wandering and perish.”
Verse CVII.2
Tirukkural
“I would not live alway: I ask not to stay
Where storm after storm rises dark o’er the way.”
I would not live alway (published 1826), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
