Few men who have liberated themselves from the fear of God and the fear of death are yet able to liberate themselves from the fear of man.
Art is both creation and recreation. Of the two ideas, I think art as recreation or as sheer play of the human spirit is more important.
Creative work carries with it a form of intense love.
My faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth. Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined and regimented soldier.
There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.
The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world.
Instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey.
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.
Best behavior means the same thing as the most uncomfortable behavior.