— Don Quixote (1605), Part 2, Chapter 42
About this quote
हिन्दी में
तुम्हें सदा यह ध्यान में रखना है कि तुम क्या हो, और स्वयं को जानने का प्रयास करते रहना है — मन जो कुछ भी सोच सके, उसमें सबसे कठिन काम यही है।
What it means
The sentence quietly reverses the oldest maxim in the business. ‘Know thyself’ is normally handed over as a starting instruction, the easy first step before the real work. Here it is rated the hardest thing the mind can imagine — harder than anything else it could put on the list. That grading, not the instruction, is the content.
The grammar matters too. Keep in view and striving are both continuous; neither describes something you finish. So the line is often circulated as a tidy self-improvement motto, and it is closer to a warning about difficulty — the advice concedes, in its own verbs, that you may not arrive.
What it teaches you
Treat a settled account of yourself as the warning sign. If your self-description has not changed in years, the line’s claim is that you have stopped checking rather than that you got it right. The practical form is to expect to be wrong about your own motives in some specific, nameable way, and to look for that particular error on a schedule.
अर्थ और सीख
‘ख़ुद को जानो’ आम तौर पर पहला और आसान क़दम मान कर कहा जाता है, पर यहाँ इसे मन की कल्पना में सबसे कठिन काम बताया गया है — असली बात यही उलटाव है। ‘ध्यान में रखना’ और ‘प्रयास करते रहना’ — दोनों लगातार चलने वाले काम हैं, कोई पूरा होने वाला लक्ष्य नहीं। सीख यह है कि अपने बारे में बनी-बनाई राय को अंतिम न मानें; जहाँ वह वर्षों से नहीं बदली, वहाँ जाँच रुक गई है, बात सही नहीं हो गई।
Where it comes from
Don Quixote advising Sancho Panza before he takes up his governorship — the second item in a long list of counsels, and the one everything else depends on.
The irony is entirely intentional. The advice is excellent, and it comes from a man who has spent two volumes being unable to see himself clearly at all. Cervantes does not resolve the joke.
