Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Why should man bother himself so much about salvation, unless he has a feeling of being doomed?
Men resort to talking only when they haven't the power to enforce their convictions upon others.
There is something in the nature of tea that leads us into a world of quiet contemplation of life.
A tendency to fly too straight at a goal, instead of circling around it, often carries one too far.
All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell.
There is no proper time and place for reading. When the mood for reading comes, one can read anywhere
I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie. Neckties strangle clear thinking.
Not until we see the richness of the Hindu mind and its essential spirituality can we understand India
If one's bowels move, one is happy, and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it.
It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams.
True peace of mind comes from accepting the worst. Psychologically, I think it means a release of energy.
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
Of all the unhappy people in the world, the unhappiest are those who have not found something they want to do.
It is that unoccupied space which makes a room habitable, as it is our leisure hours which make life endurable.
The world I believe is far too serious, and being far too serious ... it has need of a wise and merry philosophy.
A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon ruined for him already.
A cocktail party is a place where you talk with a person you do not know about a subject you have no interest in.
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.
As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini.
The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall not have sons and grandsons of whom we need to be ashamed.
Once [China] had a destiny. Once she was a conqueror. Now her greatest destiny seems to be merely to exist, to survive.
A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.
Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.
Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.
In the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them.
Only he who handles his ideas lightly is master of his ideas, and only he who is master of his ideas is not enslaved by them.
Now it is characteristic of play that one plays without reason and there must be no reason for it. Play is its own good reason.
The dog which remembers only to bark and not to bite, and is led through the streets as a lady's pet, is only a degenerate wolf.
Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.
To glorify the past and paint the future is easy, to survey the present and emerge with some light and understanding is difficult.
There is so much to love and to admire in this life that it is an act of ingratitude not to be happy and content in this existence.
We (the Chinese) eat food for its texture, the elastic or crisp effect it has on our teeth, as well as for fragrance, flavor and color.
It is not so much what you believe in that matters, as the way in which you believe it and proceed to translate that belief into action.
Art is both creation and recreation. Of the two ideas, I think art as recreation or as sheer play of the human spirit is more important.
Few men who have liberated themselves from the fear of God and the fear of death are yet able to liberate themselves from the fear of man.
When we demand liberty of a person as a constitutional right, we are taking away from the officials their liberty to chop off people's heads.
Instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey.
No child is born with a really cold heart, and it is only in proportion as we lose that youthful heart that we lose the inner warmth in ourselves.
Business men who are busy the whole day and immediately go to bed after supper, snoring like cows, are not likely to contribute anything to culture.
The age calls for simple statements and restatements of simple truths. The prophets of doom are involved, those who would bring light must be clear.
Alas, our rulers are not gods, but puny, fallible men, like the kings who constantly forget their parts, and we common men should be their prompters.
Somewhere in [China's] soul lurks the cunning of an old dog, and it is a cunning that is strangely impressive. What a strange old soul! What a great old soul!
The only part of Christian teachings which will be truly accepted by the Chinese people is Christ's injunction to be "harmless as doves" but "wise as serpents.
Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
It is not dirt but the fear of dirt which is the sign of man's degeneration, and it is dangerous to judge a man's physical and moral sanity by outside standards.
O wise humanity, terribly wise humanity! How inscrutable is the civilization where men toil and work and worry their hair gray to get a living and forget to play!
Where there are too many policemen, there is no liberty. Where there are too many soldiers, there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers, there is no justice.
All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.
Let us face ourselves bravely as we are. For only a philosophy that recognizes reality can lead us into true happiness, and only that kind of philosophy is sound and healthy.
A vague uncritical idealism always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger to mankind, leading it round in a futile wild-goose chase for imaginary ideals.