Zhuang Zhou

Man – a creature made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

We all really basically have a lot of magic … it’s only those of us that choose to accept it that really understand it.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities – a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces –a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

If you are in a poker game and after 20 minutes you don’t know who the patsy is, then you’re the patsy.

Nature has given us two ears, two eyes, and but one tongue-to the end that we should hear and see more than we speak.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

Logic is a poor guide compared with custom.

In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.

All the great ages have been ages of belief.

You must not only aim right, but draw the bow with all your might.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous.

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.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.