Zhuang Zhou Quotes

Know, first, who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.

The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.

Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

Let us suppose that a man believes in eternal life on Christ's word. In that case he believes without any fuss about being profound and searching and philosophical and racking his brains.

We have to care about our bodies and what we put in them. Women have to take the time to focus on our mental health—take time for self, for the spiritual, without feeling guilty or selfish. The world will see you the way you see you, and treat you the way you treat yourself.

Su Tungp'o said: "Life is like a spring dream which vanishes without a trace." I should be ungrateful to the gods if I did not try to put my life down on record.

The wise man who has charge of governing the empire should know the cause of disorder before he can put it in order. Unless he knows its cause, he cannot regulate it.

Hey! Hey, you! Fleeing away, eh? Aren't you ashamed of yourself? Wanna drag it to the last scene? Playing the tricks to have a bigger role, no?

From the time they turned one they were tossed from the balconies of the kitchens, first with life preserves so they would lose their fear of the water, and then without life preservers so they would lose their respect for death.

Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read-ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.

I am completely indebted to Jimmy Baldwin's prose. It liberated me as a writer. These poems overwhelm without competing with his prose, and I am grateful to have this collection.

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

If you could count the skeletons in my closet, under my bed and up under my faucet
Then you would know I've completely lost it
Is he nuts? No he's insane!

What you spend your energy on, that’s the day.

Suppose we try to locate the cause of disorder, we shall find it lies in the want of mutual love.

...the key factor in industry is creativity. I said there are three creativities: creativity in technology, in product planning, and in marketing. To have any one of these without the others is self defeating in business.