Surah 26. Ash-Shuara, Ayah 191

With this refrain ends the cycle of seven stories showing that spiritual truth in all its manifestations - whether it relates to an intellectual realization of God’s existence, to a refusal to regard power, wealth or fame as real values, or to the virtues of compassion and kindness towards all that lives on earth - has at all times been unacceptable to the overwhelming majority of mankind, and has always been submerged under the average man’s blindness and deafness of heart. The very repetition of phrases, sentences and situations in all of the above stories - or, rather, in the above versions of these oft-narrated stories - tends to bring home to us the fact that the human situation as such never really changes, and that, in consequence, those who preach the truth must always struggle against human greed, power-hunger and proneness to self-adulation.

See above, n. 3193 to xxvi. 121.