Actual philosophers. . . are commanders and law-givers: they say "thus it shall be!", it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past - they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer.
Let the winds blow! a fiercer gale Is wild within me! what may quell That sullen tempest? I must sail Whither, O whither, who can tell!
But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate. I wonder, for it is hard for me to conceive how men who knew the word "I," could give it up and not know what they lost. But such has been the story, for I have lived in the City of the damned, and I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them.
Seamen three! what men be ye? Gotham's three Wise Men we be. Whither in your bowl so free? To rake the moon from out the sea. The bowl goes trim. The moon doth shine, And our ballast is old wine.
There is no fair wind for one who knows not whither he is bound.
I depart, Whither I know not; but the hour's gone by When Albion's lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.
Needy knife-grinder! whither are ye going? Rough is the road, your wheel is out of order; Bleak blows the blast-your hat has got a hole in it. So have your breeches.
Let us follow the truth whither so ever it leads.
I know not whence I came, nor whither I go, nor who I am.
Who knows whence he comes, where he is, and whither he tends, he, and he alone, is wise.
Many of our troubles are God dragging us, and they would end if we would stand upon our feet and go whither He would have us go.
Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go.
Whither should we aim if not towards God?
I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.
This characteristic of Dasein's being this "that it is" is veiled in its "whence" and "whither.
We must ask where we are and whither we are tending.
Rivers are highways that move on and bear us whither we wish to go.
Abraham did not know where he was going immediately, but he knew where he was going ultimately. He did not know the Whither but he knew the Whom. He believed God, and, being sure of his destiny, he did not worry about his destination.
Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question. Science has no answer to it.
I prove the supreme law of Gods and sky, And the primordial germs of things unfold, Whence Nature all creates, and multiplies And fosters all, and whither she resolves Each in the end when each is overthrown. This ultimate stock we have devised to name Procreant atoms, matter, seeds of things, Or primal bodies, as primal to the world.
