— Divan-e-Ghalib, from the ghazal "hazaaron khwahishen aisi"
About this quote
देवनागरी
हज़ारों ख़्वाहिशें ऐसी कि हर ख़्वाहिश पे दम निकले
बहुत निकले मेरे अरमान लेकिन फिर भी कम निकले
English
A thousand desires, each worth dying for — many of mine were fulfilled, yet somehow too few.
What it means
Ghalib’s most famous couplet is about the arithmetic of longing: fulfilment never catches up with desire. However much life grants, the heart’s ledger always shows a deficit — wanting is infinite, getting is not.
One verb carries the entire couplet: nikle appears three times, and each time it does different work — the breath leaving the body, the desires coming out, the tally falling short. The arithmetic breaks in the first line, not the second: if each wish costs a whole life, a thousand of them were never affordable. And the second line is genuinely read two ways — that many desires were fulfilled, or that many merely came pouring out — and the difference matters, because on the second reading what is in short supply is not the harvest but the wanting itself, which would still be too little however much of it arrived.
What it teaches you
Notice that you are scoring your life against a denominator that grows every time you add to it — which is why the result is always a deficit, no matter what the year actually gave you. Do the harder, smaller thing: name the two or three wants you would genuinely spend a life on, and let the rest stay unranked. The list you never cut is the reason nothing on it ever feels like enough.
अर्थ और सीख
इंसान की ख़्वाहिशें अनगिनत हैं — कितनी भी पूरी हो जाएँ, दिल को हमेशा कम ही लगती हैं। ग़ालिब कहते हैं कि चाहत का हिसाब कभी बराबर नहीं होता।
हज़ार ख़्वाहिशों से अपने जीवन का हिसाब न लगाइए — वह हिसाब हमेशा घाटे में रहेगा। दो-चार चुनिए जिन पर जान देना सच में मंज़ूर हो।
Where it comes from
An authentic couplet from the Divan-e-Ghalib, the collected Urdu ghazals of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869), from the ghazal beginning “hazaaron khwahishen aisi”. Transliteration and English rendering are our own.
