Li Qunyu

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved.

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

Guilt, regret, resentment, sadness and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past and not enough presence.

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.

The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.

The connection between us runs so strong and deep. It’s like a steel cable stretching across the ocean bed, so many fathoms below, that even the most skilled and courageous of deep sea divers cannot reach it to cut it. It remains strong, silent, invisible, invincible.

No matter how carefully you plan your goals they will never be more than pipe dreams unless you pursue them with gusto.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.