Omar Khayyam Quotes

Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why: drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

We know there are poets who are chosen: by what or whom, we no more know than what lies beyond our final breath, or what caused a certain action which resulted in the fulfillment or the desecration and collapse of what we most cared for in life.

The two grand tyrants of the Earth, Time and Chance.

I don't know if I was put on this Earth for a purpose or not. But I'm fairly confident that I'll be taken off of it for one.

What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt?

Fortune raises up and fortune brings low both the man who fares well and the one who fares badly; and there is no prophet of the future for mortal men.

Time is the king of all men, he is their parent and their grave, and gives them what he will and not what they crave.

I have a rendezvous with life.

Just before she died she asked, What is the answer? No answer came. She laughed and said, In that case, what is the question? Then she died.

We are not saints, gods, spiritual human beings that we can sit and decide whether a film will do well or not. It is not in our hands.

Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.

When I'm lying in my bed I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me.

Not without a shudder may the human hand reach into the mysterious urn of destiny.

To be or not to be. That's not really a question.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Life is a school of probability

The nature of life is that we do not control it.

Wee know not who lives or dies.

Life, not death, is the great mystery you must confront.

Our souls are but leaves in a storm, and only the gods know where we will come to rest.

Who knows if the gods above will add tomorrow's span to this day's sum?

I am hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan, like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.

Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.

Just as I do not know where I came from, so I do not know where I am going. All I know is that when I leave this world I shall fall forever into oblivion, or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing which of the two will be my lot for eternity. Such is my state of mind, full of weakness and uncertainty. The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of trying to find out what is going to happen to me.