Quotes from Sir Richard Francis Burton

What call ye them or Goods or Ills, ill-goods, good-ills, a loss, a gain, When realms arise and falls a roof; a world is won, a man is slain?

Man worships self: his God is Man; the struggling of the mortal mind To form its model as 'twould be, the perfect of itself to find.

There is no God, no man-made God; a bigger, stronger, crueller man; Black phantom of our baby-fears, ere Thought, the life of Life, began.

Cease, Man, to mourn, to weep, to wail; enjoy thy shining hour of sun; We dance along Death's icy brink, but is the dance less full of fun?

Hardly we find the path of love, to sink the self, forget the "I," When sad suspicion grips the heart, when Man, the Man begins to die:

Is not man born with a love of change an Englishman to be discontented an Anglo-Indian to grumble?

Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause; He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws. All other Life is living Death, a world where none but Phantoms dwell, A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling of the camel-bell.

Yes Truth may be, but 'tis not Here; mankind must seek and find it There, But Where nor I nor you can tell, nor aught earth-mother ever bare. Enough to think that Truth can be: come sit we where the roses glow, Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to 'unknow.'

"Be ye Good Boys, go seek for Heav'en, come pay the priest that holds the key;" So spake, and speaks, and aye shall speak the last to enter Heaven, he.

"'Tis blessed to believe"; you say: The saying may be true enow And it can add to Life a light: only remains to show us how.

What is the Truth? was askt of yore. Reply all object Truth is one As twain of halves aye makes a whole; the moral Truth for all is none.

Broke is a temporary condition, poor is a state of mind.

Conquer thyself, till thou has done this, thou art but a slave for it is almost as well to be subjected to another's appetite as to thine own.

The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own.