The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world.
A solemn funeral is inconceivable to the Chinese mind.
The dog which remembers only to bark and not to bite, and is led through the streets as a lady’s pet, is only a degenerate wolf.
The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become.
Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body.
I distrust all dead and mechanical formulas for expressing anything connected with human affairs and human personalities. Putting human affairs in exact formulas shows in itself a lack of the sense of humor and therefore a lack of wisdom.
In the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them.
The end of living is the true enjoyment of it.
When we demand liberty of a person as a constitutional right, we are taking away from the officials their liberty to chop off people’s heads.
If there is anything we are serious about, it is neither religion nor learning, but food.
Even in despair, man must laugh.
Life is too short to make an over-serious business out of it.
All human beings are like travelers floating down the eternal river of time, embarking at a certain point and disembarking again at another point in order to make room for others waiting below the river to come aboard.
The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous.
Best behavior means the same thing as the most uncomfortable behavior.
Business men who are busy the whole day and immediately go to bed after supper, snoring like cows, are not likely to contribute anything to culture.
I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie. Neckties strangle clear thinking.
O wise humanity, terribly wise humanity! How inscrutable is the civilization where men toil and work and worry their hair gray to get a living and forget to play!
Now it is characteristic of play that one plays without reason and there must be no reason for it. Play is its own good reason.
All human happiness is sensuous happiness.