Life & Wisdom Quote by Jose Rizal

A cold splash of realism, aimed at a colony tempted to outsource its future. Rizal isn’t begging for benevolence; he’s warning against the whole fantasy that a transient profiteer will ever love your country more than his ledger. The line works because it refuses sentimentality. “Let us not ask for miracles” isn’t humility so much as a rebuke: stop treating justice as an act of charity you must plead for. In the next breath, he sketches a type recognizable in any era of extractive capitalism: the outsider who arrives “as a stranger”, mines opportunity, then exits clean, leaving the social cost to the locals.

The subtext is sharper than the polite phrasing suggests. Rizal is talking about power - who has it, who benefits, and who gets stuck with the aftermath. He’s puncturing the colonial myth of the enlightened administrator or well-meaning investor who will modernize the place out of goodwill. Don’t expect “concern with what is good for the country” from someone whose relationship to the nation is purely transactional. The sentence turns the stranger into a moral alibi the colonized keep offering themselves: if we just appeal to his conscience, he’ll do right by us. Rizal’s answer is basically: why would he?

Context matters: late 19th-century Spanish rule in the Philippines, with its rotating officials, friar power, and an economy structured to extract, not cultivate. As a writer who understood narrative as a weapon, Rizal uses a simple structure - repeated “let us not ask” - to train readers out of dependency. The real demand isn’t for miracles; it’s for agency.