Life & Wisdom Quote by Muhammed Iqbal

Iqbal’s line lands like a rebuke to any spirituality or politics that survives on soothing fog. “Conduct” isn’t vibes or private belief; it’s action with stakes, the kind that “involves a decision of the ultimate fate of the agent.” He’s dragging ethics out of the realm of tasteful sentiment and putting it under a harsher light: if your choices shape who you become - and, in Iqbal’s metaphysical frame, what you answer for - then you don’t get to build those choices on comforting hallucinations.

The operative word is “illusions.” Iqbal isn’t only warning against superstition; he’s also taking aim at cultural self-deceptions: inherited fatalism, hollow ritual, moral laziness disguised as humility. The subtext is anti-escapist. Illusion is whatever lets the self avoid responsibility, whatever makes submission look like peace. In his broader project, especially the “khudi” (selfhood) he champions, the self is meant to be strengthened through truthful encounter with reality - spiritual reality included, but never as a narcotic.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in late colonial India, Iqbal watched communities asked to interpret their decline as destiny and their politics as theater. His poetry and philosophy push back: a people doesn’t regenerate through nostalgia or slogans, but through disciplined perception and deliberate action. The sentence works because it yokes existential consequence to epistemic honesty. If your fate is on the line, then clarity isn’t a luxury; it’s the minimum moral requirement.