“I am bound to take careful thought concerning the consequences of every word and deed. When, however, the Future has become the Past, it would be the merest vanity for me to grieve or to repent over that which was decreed by universal Law.”
The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870), Note I : Hâjî Abdû, The Man
Context: I am an individual … a circle touching and intersecting my neighbours at certain points, but nowhere corresponding, nowhere blending. Physically I am not identical in all points with other men. Morally I differ from them: in nothing do the approaches of knowledge, my five organs of sense (with their Shelleyan "interpenetration"), exactly resemble those of any other being. Ergo, the effect of the world, of life, of natural objects, will not in my case be the same as with the beings most resembling me. Thus I claim the right of creating or modifying for my own and private use, the system which most imports me; and if the reasonable leave be refused to me, I take it without leave.
But my individuality, however all-sufficient for myself, is an infinitesimal point, an atom subject in all things to the Law of Storms called Life. I feel, I know that Fate is. But I cannot know what is or what is not fated to befall me. Therefore in the pursuit of perfection as an individual lies my highest, and indeed my only duty, the "I" being duly blended with the "We." I object to be a "self-less man," which to me denotes an inverted moral sense. I am bound to take careful thought concerning the consequences of every word and deed. When, however, the Future has become the Past, it would be the merest vanity for me to grieve or to repent over that which was decreed by universal Law.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Richard Francis Burton 78
British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, … 1821–1890Related quotes
As translated by H. B. Nisbet (1975)
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1
“The time has come for me to forget my past and live a future that even I am unaware of.”
When she left the Nitygram village quoted in "Bowing Out".
In Quest of Democracy (1991)
Volkogonov
Dmitri
1996
Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary
Free Press, Simon and Schuster
https://books.google.com/books?id=3dCc5Ovw4sUC&pg=PA409#v=onepage&f=false
9780684822938
.
Source: Interview by Prince Rama Varma There's no one way to teach. http://hindu.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?file=2006030400630400.htm&date=2006/03/04/&prd=mp&, The Hindu, 4 March 2006.
Top 15 quotes from PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi
As quoted in Debussy (1989) by Paul Holmes, p. 36
Context: Music would take over at the point at which words become powerless, with the one and only object of expressing that which nothing but music could express. For this, I need a text by a poet who, resorting to discreet suggestion rather than full statement, will enable me to graft my dream upon his dream — who will give me plain human beings in a setting belonging to no particular period or country. … Then I do not wish my music to drown the words, nor to delay the course of the action. I want no purely musical developments which are not called for inevitably by the text. In opera there is always too much singing. Music should be as swift and mobile as the words themselves.