Zhuang Zhou

Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years! Dont be content with things as they are. Dont take No for an answer. Never submit to failure. Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance. You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won by youth. She has lived and thrived only by repeated subjugations.

Your mind makes a cruel master, but a generous servant.

Familiarity breeds contempt and children.

Worrying is like paying on a debt that may never come due.

With a burst of joy, my heels sprout wings, smile dancing. My heart sings like a bird caged, set free to soar, senses heightened like never before. Life. Is. Good.

There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.

Never, my dear Sir, do you take it into your head that I do not love you; you may settle yourself in full confidence both of my love and my esteem; I love you as a kind man, I value you as a worthy man, and hope in time to reverence you as a man of exemplary piety.

I talk democracy to these men and women. I tell them that they have the vote, and that theirs is the kingdom and the power and the glory. I say to them You are supreme: exercise your power. They say, That’s right: tell us what to do; and I tell them. I say Exercise our vote intelligently by voting for me. And they do. That’s democracy; and a splendid thing it is too for putting the right men in the right place.

Every being is in search of truth, but small fears go on preventing you.

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.

At the end of my life, with just one breath left, if you come, I’ll sit up and sing.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds – not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but – a hatred of all injury.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call.