“Shahid's caravan left before ours; believe me, ours will also leave.”
From Rudaki's elegy mourning his fellow court poet Shahid Balkhi, who died in 936 CE — a meditation on mortality: those who have died went ahead on the same road every living person must eventually travel.
— Traditional Tajikistan Wisdom, Tajikistan
Source: Rudaki (c. 858-941 CE), elegy for Shahid Balkhi (d. 936 CE), a widely quoted classical Persian-Tajik verse cited in Rudaki scholarship (e.g. Sassan Tabatabai, Father of Persian Verse: Rudaki and His Poetry, Leiden University Press, 2010)
More Proverbs from Tajikistan
A man without a fatherland is like a nightingale without a garden.
Homeland and national identity are essential to a person's sense of belonging.
The rich eat kebab, the poor inhale the smoke.
A wry observation on economic inequality — the poor are left with only the smell of others' plenty.
A chicken you eat only once — its eggs, a hundred times.
Favors sustainable use of resources over a single short-term gain.
For a greedy man, even his own tomb is too small.
No amount of wealth satisfies greed — even in death the greedy remain unsatisfied.
The sun cannot be covered with a skirt.
The truth is too great to be hidden or suppressed, no matter how hard one tries.
A woman's work is worth more than the talk of a thousand men.
Celebrates the practical value of women's labor over empty words.