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The Dhammapada is a collection of 423 short verses of the Buddha's teaching, preserved in Pali, an ancient Indian language. Verses 121 and 122 warn against thinking lightly of a small wrong, as if it could never catch up with you: a water jar fills drop by drop, and a fool fills with wrongdoing little by little. The same is true of small good deeds, which slowly fill the wise. The verses apply the image to what people do, not to money.
This line comes from “Ourselves”, a short rhymed poem by Paul Carus (1852–1919), a German-American writer who helped introduce Buddhism to Western readers; it is the poem's fifth line in the enlarged 1907 edition of his book The Dharma. It is a free adaptation, not a translation of any single verse. Carus drew on the Dhammapada, a collection of the Buddha's sayings: verse 165 says that purity and impurity depend on oneself and no one can purify another, and verse 276 says that you must make the effort yourselves; the Buddhas only show the way.
This sentence has not been found in Rumi's writings, but it echoes a story in his Masnavi, the long Persian poem he dictated in Konya. Moses hears a shepherd offering, in homely words, to mend God's shoes, comb his hair and bring him milk. Moses scolds him, and God rebukes Moses: he was sent to bring people closer, not to drive them away. God's answer includes the line “The religion of love is apart from all religions.” When Rumi died in 1273, Christians and Jews joined his mourners.
A modern verse inspired by the Rubáiyát, the four-line poems credited to the Persian poet Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), not a translation. Its contrast between learned debate and the cup in hand runs through Edward FitzGerald's English version. In one quatrain the young poet eagerly hears scholars and holy men argue, “but evermore / Came out by the same door where in I went”. In another he sends his soul to bring back news of the afterlife, and it answers: “I Myself am Heav'n and Hell.”
The first seven scrolls were found in 1946–47 by Bedouin shepherds in a cave about 1.5 km from the north-western shore of the Dead Sea. By 1956 eleven caves around Qumran had yielded pieces of 981 different manuscripts, mostly in Hebrew, some in Aramaic and Greek. Many scholars link them with the Essenes, a strict Jewish group of the time, though others think they came from Jerusalem priests or other groups. Most survive only as fragments of parchment and papyrus. Copies or pieces of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther have been identified. The Isaiah scroll, 17 sheets of parchment sewn together, is the only Qumran scroll preserved almost whole, and it is about a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew Bible manuscripts known before the discovery. It is kept at the Shrine of the Book in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
A modern paraphrase, not a quotation. It condenses the opening of the Dhammapada, 423 short verses traditionally held to be the Buddha's words and part of the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism, followed mainly in Sri Lanka and South-East Asia; some scholars trace its core to the third century BC. Its first two verses say that the mind comes before everything we experience: act with a corrupted mind and suffering follows, as the cartwheel follows the ox; act with a pure mind and happiness follows like a shadow that never leaves.
The saying shortens Proverbs 16:18, which the King James Bible of 1611 renders: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” The Book of Proverbs, part of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament), gathers wise sayings; tradition credits many to King Solomon, but scholars see several collections assembled over centuries. The verse is a matching pair, its second half repeating the first in other words. The ancient Greeks had the same idea: hubris, arrogance that oversteps human limits, and Nemesis, the goddess who punishes it.
The line comes from the first chapter of Ecclesiastes, a book of the Hebrew Bible whose speaker calls himself Qoheleth, “the Teacher”, son of David and king in Jerusalem. Tradition made him Solomon, but Persian loanwords point to a date between about 450 and 180 BC. The book opens by calling everything hevel, “breath”, traditionally “vanity”: the sun rises and sets, rivers run into a sea that is never full, and what has been will be again. Hemingway took the title The Sun Also Rises from the same chapter.
John's Gospel was written around the end of the first century AD. In chapter 8 Jesus, teaching in the Temple in Jerusalem, tells new believers that if they hold to his teaching, they will know the truth and the truth will make them free; the freedom he means is freedom from sin. In English or in Latin, Veritas vos liberabit, the verse is the motto of many universities, including Caltech and Johns Hopkins, and it is carved in stone at the CIA's original headquarters.
Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher and the son of a Protestant pastor. He put the famous line in the mouth of a madman who runs into a marketplace with a lantern in broad daylight, looking for God. The unbelievers standing around laugh at him, and he tells them that 'we have killed him': modern science and ways of thinking had made the old faith hard to hold. The danger he saw was nihilism, the sense that nothing has value once its old foundation has gone. His answer, developed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), was that people would have to create new values for themselves, an ideal he called the Übermensch, or 'overhuman'. The line became one of the most quoted in modern philosophy, and thinkers from Heidegger to the theologians of the 1960s argued over its meaning.
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a mathematician and physicist who, with Pierre de Fermat, laid the foundations of probability theory; he also built one of the first mechanical calculators. In later life he turned to religion and began notes for a defence of Christianity. He died before finishing it, and the notes were published in 1670 as the Pensées (“Thoughts”). The wager is not a proof that God exists. It is a decision argument: when reason cannot settle a question, weigh the possible gains and losses of each choice. For that reason it is often described as the first use of decision theory. Critics objected that many religions make similar promises, so the bet does not say which god to back, and that belief cannot simply be chosen. Pascal's answer was to act as believers do until belief follows.
Modern translations usually say 'revelation' or 'prophetic vision' instead of 'vision', and 'cast off restraint' instead of 'perish'. The Hebrew word, chazon, is the one the Bible uses for a prophet's vision, as in the first verse of the Book of Isaiah. The verse ends 'but he that keepeth the law, happy is he', so its subject is God's word and obedience to it. The Book of Proverbs is a collection of wise sayings traditionally linked to King Solomon. As a business slogan, it loses that meaning.
The story survives mainly in two Icelandic books of the 13th century. The Poetic Edda collects older anonymous poems, above all Völuspá, 'The Seeress's Prophecy'; the Prose Edda is a guide to the myths written around 1220 by the poet and chieftain Snorri Sturluson. In the final battle the wolf Fenrir swallows Odin, Thor kills the world serpent Jörmungandr but dies of its venom, and Loki and the watchman god Heimdall kill each other. Yet the story goes on: Odin's son Vídar avenges him, a green earth rises from the sea, and two humans, Líf and Lífthrasir, who sheltered in a wood, begin humankind again.
This wording is not in any Buddhist scripture. It reworks a short discourse in the Anguttara Nikaya (3.131), part of the Pali Canon, which contrasts things done in secret with three that shine openly: the moon, the sun, and the teaching of the Tathagata, a title the Buddha used for himself. In 1907 the Indian Buddhist writer P. Lakshmi Narasu rendered them as three things that shine before the world and cannot be hidden. Later versions turned a point about openness into a promise that truth will come out.
The coloured sand is poured through narrow, ridged metal funnels called chak-pur: rubbing a rod along the ridges makes the sand trickle out a few grains at a time. Each mandala is a flat plan of a three-dimensional sacred palace; the Kalachakra mandala alone contains 722 deities. When it is finished, the monks hold a dissolution ceremony. They sweep the design into a heap, collect the sand in a jar wrapped in silk and carry it to a river or other moving water, so that its blessing spreads out into the world. The whole ritual is a lesson in impermanence, the Buddhist teaching that nothing material lasts.
Formosus had been pope from 891 to 896 and had been dead for about nine months. The trial was political: Rome's noble families fought over the papacy, and Formosus had crowned a German rival of the powerful Spoleto family as emperor, while Stephen owed his position to that family. The verdict declared that Formosus had never been a lawful pope, annulled his acts, including the priests he had ordained, and cut off the three fingers of his right hand used for blessing. The body was later thrown into the Tiber. Public anger grew, and within months Stephen was deposed, imprisoned and strangled. Later popes annulled the trial and banned trials of the dead.
Hajj falls in Dhu al-Hijjah, the last month of the Islamic lunar calendar, so its date moves about 11 days earlier each year. Its central rite is standing at Arafat on the ninth day, from midday to sunset. Pilgrims then spend the night at Muzdalifah and, at Mina, throw pebbles at three stone pillars, recalling Abraham's rejection of Satan's temptation. The tenth day is Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, celebrated by Muslims everywhere. Hajj is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, the basic duties of the faith. In recent years around 1.7 to 1.8 million pilgrims have taken part.
Emperor Justinian I ordered the church after riots in 532 burned down its predecessor. Two scholars, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, both skilled in mathematics and mechanics, designed it, and it was finished in under six years. The dome is about 31 metres across and its crown rises some 55 metres above the floor. The historian Procopius wrote that it seemed not to rest on masonry but to hang from heaven on a golden chain. Earthquakes brought part of the first dome down in 558, and it was rebuilt higher and steeper. The building was a cathedral for over 900 years, a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of 1453 and a museum from 1934, and it has been a mosque again since 2020.
Tradition credits the churches to King Gebre Meskel Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty, who reigned around the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries; archaeologists think some parts are older, and the building sequence is still debated. Legend says he meant the site as a new Jerusalem after Saladin captured Jerusalem in 1187, and many places there carry biblical names, such as a stream called the Jordan. Masons first cut trenches to free a block of rock, then hollowed out rooms, columns, windows and doors from it; the most famous church, Bete Giyorgis, is shaped like a cross when seen from above. Tunnels link the churches, which are still in daily use. UNESCO listed them as a World Heritage Site in 1978.
Gaudí took over the project in 1883 from the architect Francisco de Paula del Villar and turned a conventional neo-Gothic church into something new. For an earlier church he had studied arches with hanging chains: a chain hung from two points sags into a natural curve, and turned upside down that curve gives the shape in which a stone arch carries its load purely by compression. He also used ruled surfaces, curved shapes such as hyperboloids that can be built entirely from straight lines, which made complex stonework easier to cut. As an 'expiatory' church, built as an act of atonement, it is paid for by donations and today largely by visitors' tickets, one reason it has taken so long. Pope Benedict XVI consecrated it as a basilica in 2010. Gaudí is buried in its crypt.
A farmer ploughing a peat bog on the Trundholm moor, in north-west Zealand, turned up the chariot in 1902. In 1998 archaeologists and metal detectorists went back to the spot and recovered 21 more pieces, including parts of the wheels. Bronze Age Scandinavians left no writing, so the object itself is the main clue to their beliefs. Many archaeologists read the two faces of the disc as day and night: the bright side is shown as the sun travels from east to west by day, the dark side as it returns unseen by night. The chariot is dated to about 1400 BCE and is kept at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.
The Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi chose the site when he founded the city of Kairouan in 670. The mosque was rebuilt several times, and most of what stands today dates from the reconstruction ordered by Emir Ziyadat Allah I in 836. Its prayer hall is hypostyle, meaning the roof rests on rows of columns: 414 of them, in marble, granite and porphyry, taken from ancient sites such as Carthage, so their shafts and capitals vary. The 31.5-metre minaret, rising in three stages from a square base, is thought to be the oldest minaret still standing. The mosque became a model for later mosques across the Maghreb, the part of North Africa west of Egypt, and is part of Kairouan's World Heritage Site.
Qawwali grew up at Sufi shrines and gatherings in South Asia, where music is meant to draw listeners closer to God. The tradition is usually traced to the poet and musician Amir Khusrau (1253–1325) of Delhi. The words are Sufi poems in Urdu, Persian, Punjabi or Hindi. The lead singer may dwell on a single line for minutes, shifting its emphasis and improvising around it, while the chorus repeats it and the audience responds. In the twentieth century the Sabri Brothers and, above all, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan of Pakistan took qawwali to concert halls around the world; Nusrat's work with Western musicians in the 1990s brought it a global audience.
The oldest of the four Vedas, the Rigveda, was composed roughly between 1500 and 1000 BC and was passed on by memory for many centuries before anyone wrote it down; pupils still learn it by ear from a teacher. Besides reciting a text straight through, chanters learn it in fixed rearrangements called pathas. In a simple one, the words are chanted in overlapping pairs (1-2, 2-3, 3-4); in the most complex, ghana, they run forwards and backwards in long interlocking loops. Because every version must match the others, a slip in one shows up at once. UNESCO proclaimed the tradition of Vedic chanting a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003.
