Oh! Shabaka, why do you seek to peer into the future, which from day to day will unroll itself as does a scroll?
Be content with the present, man, and take what Fate gives you of good or ill, not seeking to learn what offerings he hides beneath his robe in the days and the years and the centuries to come." "Yet you have sought to learn those things, O Tanofir, and not in vain." "Aye and what have they made of me?
A blind old hermit weighed down with the weight of years and holding in my fingers but some few threads that with pain and grief I have plucked from the fringe of Wisdom's robe.

Be warned by me, Nephew.

While you are a man, live the life of a man, and when you become a spirit, live the life of a spirit.

But do not seek to mix the two together like oil and wine, and thus spoil both.

I am glad to learn, O Bes, that you are going to make a king's, or a slave's wife, whichever it may be, of this maiden, seeing that I love her well and hold this trade unwholesome for her.