Life & Wisdom Quote by Muhammad Iqbal

Iqbal refuses the cozy modern fantasy that meaning is something you privately invent and then curate. His “lot of man” is heavier: you’re drafted into a universe with its own “deeper aspirations,” and your job is to answer them, not escape them. That phrasing slyly upgrades the cosmos from inert scenery to a moral field, almost a partner with desires. It’s a poet’s move with a philosopher’s ambition: nature isn’t just matter; it’s direction.

The sentence pivots on a disciplined tension. “Now by adjusting himself to its forces” acknowledges constraint: physics, history, empire, mortality, the hard limits that mock self-help bravado. Then Iqbal yanks the pendulum back: “now by putting the whole of his energy to his own ends and purposes.” Not a meek surrender to fate, not a childish conquest fantasy, but an alternating rhythm of adaptation and assertion. The subtext is anti-passive spirituality. If the universe has aspirations, human agency is one of its instruments; action isn’t a betrayal of faith, it’s how faith breathes.

Context sharpens the stakes. Writing in the late colonial period, Iqbal is addressing a Muslim public pressed between political subjugation and cultural self-doubt, tempted either by resignation (“it’s destiny”) or mimicry of Western power. His answer is a third posture: cultivate the self (khudi) until it can both read reality’s forces and bend them toward ethically charged purpose. The rhetoric works because it flatters without infantilizing: you are small before the universe, yet implicated in its future.