— Attributed to Gandhi; not in his Collected Works – unverified, echoes an older Latin proverb
About this quote
हिन्दी में
ऐसे जियो जैसे कल ही चले जाना हो; और ऐसे सीखो जैसे हमेशा जीते रहना हो।
What it means
Two halves, two deliberately mismatched time horizons: one day for how you live, forever for what you learn. The mismatch is the content. Urgency is assigned to conduct and patience to study, which is the reverse of how most people actually run their lives — cramming learning into deadlines while treating the years as unlimited.
The pairing is also what keeps the first half honest. On its own, live as if you were to die tomorrow reads as a licence to spend and indulge; a person with one day left would certainly not sit down to learn anything. Held together, the two clauses cancel each other’s excesses: the first forbids postponement, the second forbids the short-termism the first would otherwise permit.
What it teaches you
Match each half to the right category and the advice becomes usable. The things that would matter if tomorrow were the last day are the unsaid apology and the unmade phone call, not the holiday or the purchase. And the second half licenses learning with no payoff schedule — a language, an instrument, a subject nobody will ever pay you for — which is exactly what gets cut first when learning is judged by return.
अर्थ और सीख
दो हिस्से, दो जानबूझकर अलग समय-सीमाएँ — जीने के लिए एक दिन, सीखने के लिए अनंत काल। यही उलटफेर इसका असली अर्थ है, क्योंकि हम आमतौर पर इसका उल्टा करते हैं: पढ़ाई को समय-सीमा में ठूँसते हैं और जीवन को असीमित मान लेते हैं। दूसरा हिस्सा पहले को बिगड़ने से बचाता है — अकेले में ‘कल मर जाना है’ भोग का बहाना बन जाता है, पर साथ में वह सिर्फ़ टालना बंद करने को कहता है।
Where it comes from
Attributed to Gandhi on posters worldwide, but not found in his Collected Works; the saying circulated in similar forms before him (a Latin proverb tradition often linked to Isidore of Seville). We class it as unverified.
