“Yesterday This Day's Madness did prepare; To-morrow's Silence, Triumph, or Despair: Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why: Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.”

— Omar Khayyam, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, trans. Edward FitzGerald, LXXIV (1889)

About Omar Khayyam

1048 – 1131

Persian polymath and poet, whose quatrains were popularised in English by Edward FitzGerald.

“The Bird of Time has but a little way to fly—and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”

“Whoever thinks algebra is a trick in obtaining unknowns has thought it in vain.”

“Ah, take the Cash in hand and wave the Rest; Oh, the brave Music of a distant Drum!”

“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces.”

“Always take the short cut; and that is the rational one. Therefore say and do everything according to soundest reason.”

“The young have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations.”

“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”

“I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest driving force behind scientific research.”

“There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.”