Charles Darwin
1876 · England · Confessing that after thirty he lost his power to enjoy poetry and music
My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts
Autobiography, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 1
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Al-Ghazali الغزالي
1095 (recalled c. 1108) · Persia and Baghdad in Seljuk times · At thirty-eight, a professor at Baghdad's leading school, after six months of hesitation
God locked my tongue so that it was held back from teaching. I would struggle with myself to teach for a single day, to ease the hearts of those who came to me, but my tongue would not utter one word and I could not do it at all. This knot in my tongue left a grief in my heart, and with it went my power to digest and my taste for food and drink.
أقفل الله على لساني حتى اعتقل عن التدريس ، فكنت أجاهد نفسي أن أدرس يوما واحدا تطييبا لقلوب المختلفة إلي ، فكان لا ينطلق لساني بكلمة واحدة ولا أستطيعها البتة ، حتى أورثت هذه العقلة في اللسان حزنا في القلب ، بطلت معه قوة الهضم ومراءة الطعام والشرابThe autobiography Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-Dalal)
Jeong Dojeon 鄭道傳
1398 · Goryeo and Joseon Korea · Said to have been written just before he was killed in the strife among the princes
At holding fast and looking within I laboured, both together, and did not betray the sages in their yellowed books. Thirty years of hard, painstaking work: one bout of drinking at the pine pavilion, and it has all come to nothing.
操存省察兩加功 不負聖賢黃卷中
三十年來勤苦業 松亭一醉竟成空Sambong jip, book 2, "Laughing at Myself"
Ferdowsi فردوسی
c. 1010 · Tus, Persia · Lamenting that he found no patron while he wrote the epic
For many years I bore much hardship, and I never saw a noble, generous man shining on the throne of kings.
بسی رنج بردم به بسیار سال
ندیدم سرافراز بخشنده ای
به گاه کیان بر درخشنده ایShahnameh (Book of Kings)
Zeami 世阿弥
c. 1400 · Muromachi Japan · On the praise a young actor wins for a passing freshness
The mind that takes the flower of the moment for the true flower is the mind that carries you still further from the true flower.
時分の花をまことの花と知る心が、真実の花になほ遠ざかる心なり。Fushikaden (The Flowering Spirit), training by age, "Twenty-four or twenty-five"
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