Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 December 5

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December 5

Who is or was Hadia Bejar?

Hadia Bejar gets a lot of ghits for the quote "The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose" (although I've also seen it attributed to Mahatma Gandhi). But I can find precisely zero biographical information about this person or their works.

Who is or was he or she? Thanks. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 13:36, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

Isn't she this Kenyan Muslim girl? Omidinist (talk) 18:45, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

If "i dnt bend values fr any being except Allah n ma parents" is an example of her literary utterances, then I really doubt she is the same Hadia Bejar who's been widely quoted.

And why did the real Hadia Bejar only ever say one thing worth quoting? And why does nobody ever say where the quote came from? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:50, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

Not really an answer, but the quotation is also very commonly attributed to George William Curtis, although I've not been able to find anything more precise. There's a Cuban actress called es:Hada Béjar, on whom we don't have an article, although she does have an entry on es:. Tevildo (talk) 23:07, 5 December 2015 (UTC)books? Tevildo (talk) 23:07, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I saw her article before I posted. I think that's a case of close but no Cuban cigar.

I looked through George William Curtis's complete works on Gutenberg and found no example of this exact quote or even anything reasonably close. He does use the word "fragrance" a lot, though.

So it seems nobody in the world knows who this mysterious person Hadia Bejar is. And nobody knows who came up with the saying. Curious. There's a whole new art form now, in coming up with, or coming across, some vaguely inspirational saying and deciding, without any authority whatsoever, to attribute it to a well known name (Shakespeare, Buddha, the Bible, Gandhi, Tolstoy ...), and spreading this misinformation across the web via Facebook or whatever. Hadia Bejar is probably some schoolgirl in Iran or Pakistan who engaged in a bit of harmless self-aggrandisement for fun one day, then forgot to take her name off the quote, and it spread, and now she's famous, nay immortal, and there's no way her name will ever become dissociated from the quote she almost certainly did NOT originate. But what do I know? I would love to be proven wrong on this one. Will the real Hadia Bejar please stand up! -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:45, 8 December 2015 (UTC)