The only real danger to our country is from within, that we forget our own power to be what we want to be.
Euthanasia is a long, smooth-sounding word, and it conceals its danger as long, smooth words do, but the danger is there, nevertheless.
No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fishermen goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.
Sooner or later the young always betrayed the old.
A person's heart withers if it does not answer another heart.
In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.
The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.
Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.
A woman's mind is not an instrument apart from her other being. She does not separate herself as man does, now flesh, now mind, now heart. She is there as one, a unity complete and unified.
To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.
Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors. They are the oldest civilized people on earth. Their civilization passes through phases but its basic characteristics remain the same. They yield, they bend to the wind, but they never break.
the vicious result of privilege is that the creature who receives it becomes incapacitated by it as by a disease.
A hungry man can't see right or wrong. He just sees food.
men cannot be free in a nation where women are forbidden freedom.
Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame.
Most mothers kiss and scold together.
To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind.
You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.
Every era of renaissance has come out of new freedoms for peoples. The coming renaissance will be greater than any in human history, for this time all the peoples of the earth will share in it.
though some men did not make war as others did, if they sold their goods for profit to the war-makers, did it make them better because the weapon was not in their own hands, if they had made the weapon and sold it and so put it into the hands of those used it upon the innocent?
I learned to distinguish between the two kinds of people in the world: those who have known inescapable sorrow and those who have not.
The rich are always afraid.
We send missionaries to China so the Chinese can get to heaven, but we won't let them into our country.
The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.
When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.
endurance of inescapable sorrow is something which has to be learned alone. And only to endure is not enough. Endurance can be a harsh and bitter root in one's life, bearing poisonous and gloomy fruit, destroying other lives. Endurance is only the beginning. There must be acceptance and the knowledge that sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.
There are many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream -- whatever that dream might be.
Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.
an artist is always seeking revelation.
People on the whole are very simple-minded, in whatever country one finds them. They are so simple as to take literally, more often than no, the things their leaders tell them.
No daughter is ever her mother's darling. That spot is always reserved for the son.
If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.
A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.
Too many escape into complexity these days. For it is an escape for persons to cry, when this question of the equality of peoples is raised in India or in our own South, 'Ah, but the situation is not so simple.' ... no great stride forward is ever made for the individual or for the human race unless the complex situation is reduced to one simple question and its simple answer.
There is, of course, a difference between what one seizes and what one really possesses.
Our children ... are not treated with sufficient respect as human beings, and yet from the moment they are born they have this right to respect. We keep them children for too long, their world separate from the real world of life.
It is love itself that is important -- the ability to love, no matter whom you love. For when you can no longer love anyone, you are no longer a living person. The heart dies if it loses the capacity to love.
What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.
In this unbelievable universe in which we live, there are no absolutes. Even parallel lines, reaching into infinity, meet somewhere yonder.
An Englishman is never afraid of being laughed at. He just thinks the other fellow is a fool. But Americans still can't risk anybody laughing at them.
But what happens when her beauty is torn from her like a cover from a book? Will he care to read her then, although her pages speak of nothing but love for him?
Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes.
starvation is a shame and disgrace to the world and totally unnecessary in modern times.
Love alone could waken love.
I know that the only completely happy life for man and for woman is their life, first together, and then with their children. I am a firm believer that no marriage can be really happy, and no home a happy one for the children as well, unless man puts woman first and woman puts man first, each for the other the giver of every good gift. Children are the fruit of this total love.
The head raised too high even in good will be struck off too soon.
Only the brave should teach....Teaching is a vocation. It is as sacred as priesthood; as innate a desire, as inescapable as the genius which compels a great artist. If he has not the concern for humanity, the love of living creatures, the vision of the priest and the artist, he must not teach.
when the people of any country choose peace at all costs, not even generals can make war.
Fatalism is a false premise. What will be is not necessarily what must be.
music is not technique and melody, but the meaning of life itself, infinitely sorrowful and unbearably beautiful.
Prejudice ... is a subjective emotion which expresses itself upon others only because of an inner necessity for release. The object is irrelevant and opportune. The person who feels prejudice is the victim of himself and his own unhappiness and dissatisfaction. Life is not what he wants it to be and it has not been what he wishes it had been.
No longer can we afford to stuff the brains of the young with facts. The time is too short, the necessity for results too pressing. The new education must be based on the elimination of facts except as they illustrate principles. How to use facts, not how to accumulate them, is the purpose of true education.
Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together.
It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundreth with a beauty.
If I have learned anything in my long life it is to be grateful for every occasion when I followed my sympathies and avoided my antipathies.
to know how to read is to light a lamp in the mind, to release the soul from prison, to open a gate to the universe." from Pavilion of Women page 292
An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls - even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls - without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell.
People don't care to read what they already think or what any people think - they know all that well enough. They want to know what they ought to think.
Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that is where I renew my springs that never dry up.
doing and being are very closely tied together, and unless you are doing what you secretly want to do, you aren't able to be the sort of person you want to be.
Religion was their meat and their excitement, their mental food and their emotional pleasure.
Love dies only when growth stops.
Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.
All birth is unwilling.
Chinese were bornwith an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naivete, and unless they were transplanted too young, these qualities ripened in them.... If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy.
destructiveness comes only when life isn't lived. People who can live their lives don't destroy themselves.
Somehow I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself
It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.
We need to restore the full meaning of that old word, duty. It is the other side of rights.
Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.
Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.
When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.
The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized.
Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession.
If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.
Once the 'what' is decided, the 'how' always follows. We must not make the 'how' an excuse for not facing and accepting the 'what.'
Man was lost if he went to a usurer, for the interest ran faster than a tiger upon him.
None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.
Exclusion is always dangerous. Inclusion is the only safety if we are to have a peaceful world.
The community must assume responsibility for each child within its confines. Not one must be neglected whatever his condition. The community must see that every child gets the advantages and opportunities which are due him as a citizen and as a human being.
The main barrier between East and West today is that the white man is not willing to give up his superiority and the colored man is no longer willing to endure his inferiority.
Upon the profound discontent of the young in every country do I set my faith. I beg you, the young, to be discontented. I pray that you may rebel against what is wrong, not with feeble negative complaining but with strong positive assertion of what is right for all humanity.
All things are possible until they are proved impossible - and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.
I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.
Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored it is a shadow over all of us, and the shadow is darkest over those who feel it least and allow its evil effects to go on.
I am comforted by life's stability, by earth's unchangeableness. What has seemed new and frightening assumes its place in the unfolding of knowledge. It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.
There is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.
Never, if you can possibly help it, write a novel. It is, in the first place, a thoroughly unsocial act. It makes one obnoxious to one's family and to one's friends. One sits about for many weeks, months, even years, in the worst cases, in a state of stupefaction.
Can such stiff and formal moldings as words capture the spirit-essence of love?
I do not believe in a child world. It is a fantasy world. I believe the child should be taught from the very first that the whole world is his world, that adult and child share one world, that all generations are needed.
A foreigner is a friend I have yet to meet.
Purposeless activity may be a phase of death.
I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.
To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.
Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.
It is ironical that in an age when we have prided ourselves on our progress in the intelligent care and teaching of children we have at the same time put them at the mercy of new and most terrible weapons of destruction.
I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.
the heart never grows old.
You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.
On this earth, though far and near, without love, there's only fear.
None but the ignorant can be bored by life. To the lovers of learning, life is pure adventure shared with adventurers.
Integrity is honesty carried through the fibres of the being and the whole mind, into thought as well as action so that the person is complete in honesty. That kind of integrity I put above all else as an essential to leadership.
One faces the future with one's past.
Nothing in life is as good as the marriage of true minds between man and woman. As good? It is life itself.
Chinese are wise in comprehending without many words what is inevitable and inescapable and therefore only to be borne.
The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.
Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung
there's two kinds of folk in the world, just like there's two kinds of life in a seed. Something sends one kind up to hunt its food in the light and air, and sends the other kind down into the earth to make the roots.
We learn as much from sorrow as from joy, as much from illness as from health, from handicap as from advantage and indeed perhaps more.
Life is the wonder with which we are all infused.
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation.
To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.
What the common man cannot understand he hates.
The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
There is no beauty without order.
Love can never be a sin. It can be only a blessing. Even if you're not loved in return -- though I can't imagine that -- to love is a proof of life -- indeed, it's the only proof, for once you can't love another human being, you're not alive.
When we know what we want to prove, we go out and find our facts. They are always there.
The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.
It is natural anywhere that people like their own kind, but it is not necessarily natural that their fondness for their own kind should lead them to the subjection of whole groups of other people not like them.
The truth has never been told about women in history: that everywhere man has gone woman has gone too, and what he has done she has done also. Women are ignorant of their own past and ignorant of their own importance in that past.
Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.
Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.
The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members
Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.
