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Why dispute what we shall be, when we know not even what we are.
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“Why dispute what we shall be, when we know not even what we are.”

Kahlil Gibran

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Source
The Madman
Date
1918
Meaning

Meaning of “Why dispute what we shall be, when we…”

Speculation about future identity becomes less certain when present self-knowledge is incomplete, making humility a reasonable response to confident predictions about becoming.

Source context

Where does it come from?

The Madman, parable of the pomegranate; the line closes a dispute among voices imagining different futures.

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DeepHumilityIdentityMindPhilosophyShortThinking Quotes About Reasoning, Reflection & JudgmentThought-Provoking Quotes That Invite ReflectionFuture
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To define is to limit.
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“To define is to limit.”

Oscar Wilde · The Picture of Dorian Gray — 1891 edition · 1891
Voice: Fictional character · Lord Henry Wotton
Meaning & context

Definitions clarify ideas but can also narrow them, especially when a label is treated as the complete reality of a person or experience.

Source details

The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Chapter 17; Lord Henry answers the Duchess of Monmouth’s question “What are you?” with “To define is to limit.”

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The future is yet to come
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“The future is yet to come”

William Hazlitt · On the Past and Future · 1821
Meaning & context

The brief phrase anchors Hazlitt’s argument that the future does not possess greater reality merely because it has not happened yet; he compares its status with the already completed past.

Source details

Table-Talk, Volume I, Essay III, “On the Past and Future,” Project Gutenberg #3020. “The future is yet to come” occurs in Hazlitt’s comparison of the already-existing past with the not-yet-existing future: the full sentence continues that the future “has never been anything.” The retained short excerpt is therefore part of a philosophical contrast, not a prediction, forecasting rule or scientific proposition.

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No man ever originates anything.
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“No man ever originates anything.”

Mark Twain · What Is Man? · 1906
Voice: Dialogue speaker · Old Man
Meaning & context

This deliberately extreme claim summarizes the Old Man’s thesis that thought is assembled from inherited experience and external influence rather than created from nothing.

Source details

What Is Man?, Old Man speaking in the opening dialogue. This collection treats the sentence as a provocative deterministic position inside the dialogue, not as settled psychology.

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What am I? A part of the infinite.
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“What am I? A part of the infinite.”

Leo Tolstoy · My Confession · 1882
Meaning & context

Tolstoy frames the self as finite yet participating in something larger, shifting the question of meaning away from isolated individual duration toward a relation with the infinite.

Source details

My Confession, Leo Wiener translation; the question appears in Tolstoy’s investigation of how finite human life might be related to an infinite reality.

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Diversity repels; likeness attracts.
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“Diversity repels; likeness attracts.”

Boethius · How Substances Can Be Good in Virtue of Their Existence Without Being Absolute Goods · c. 520s
Meaning & context

The concise axiom is one premise in Boethius’s metaphysical argument: things are described as tending toward what is like them, not as a modern empirical rule about human attraction or relationships.

Source details

How Substances Can Be Good in Virtue of Their Existence Without Being Absolute Goods (De Hebdomadibus), preliminary proposition IX, H. F. Stewart / E. K. Rand 1918 edition, Project Gutenberg #13316. Kept as a historical metaphysical premise, not social-science evidence.

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