Today, I’d like to dedicate my blog to our students—and to all students all over the world.
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever,” as Mahatma Gandhi once said.
Gandhi might not have said it exactly this way, but the idea is the same. Rajmohan Gandhi (in “The good boatman: a portrait of Gandhi” from 1995) explains his grandfather’s view as “[…] a man should live thinking he might die tomorrow but learn as if he would live forever.” Incidentally, Rajmohan Gandhi is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with whom we have had an excellent student exchange at the beginning of the years 2000.
We find the same idea in “Etymologiae” by Isidore of Seville, who lived much earlier (560 – 436): “Study as if you were to live forever. Live as if you were to die tomorrow.”
A variation of the same message (in “Hadith”) is attributed to Muhammad: “Live for your afterlife as if you will die tomorrow, and live for this life as if you will live forever.”
Some researchers attribute this quote to Desiderius Erasmus (1466 – 1536). “[…] live as if you are to die tomorrow, study as if you were to live forever.”
Our students have been wonderfully diligent. I’m glad to see the number of taken courses increasing daily. It shows that “knowledge to everyone everywhere” is indeed the way to go.
Keep up the good work. Don’t postpone learning, my friends, do it rather today than tomorrow, for even the littlest of matters you learn adds to our collective knowledge. It may seem to you, at times, like no more than a tiny little drop—but then, even the great oceans are made of many tiny little drops, aren’t they?
Featured image: Even the great oceans are made of many tiny little drops (photo by Nick Grabowski).