“What see we here? Forms, nothing more! Forms fill the brightest, strongest eye,
We know not substance; 'mid the shades shadows ourselves we live and die.”
The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)
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Richard Francis Burton 78
British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, … 1821–1890Related quotes

“We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.”
Act I
Buchanan Dying (1974)
Context: Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.

Speech to the Empire Parliamentary Association's Conference in Westminster Hall (4 July 1935); published in This Torch of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses (1935), pp. 5-6.
1935

“What we think out for ourselves forms channels in which other thoughts will flow.”
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 274

“So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.”
Source: The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Ch. 19
“Usually, if we hate, it is the shadow of the person that we hate, rather than the substance.”
"Hate Is Rarely a Personal Matter"
The Best of Sydney J. Harris (1975)
Context: Usually, if we hate, it is the shadow of the person that we hate, rather than the substance. We may hate a person because he reminds us of someone we feared and disliked when younger; or because we see in him some gross caricature of what we find repugnant in ourself; or because he symbolizes an attitude that seems to threaten us.