It was strange how these poems came to him nowadays, the distillation of his private emotions, of his disillusionment, of his solitude, of his yearning for a future in which, nevertheless, he could not believe.
The Empress Mother said with still more irritation, “I cannot understand why we must have a foreign religion here when we have three good religions of our own.
Attachment,” Buddha had said, “is the cause of grief.
Wang Lung, seeing them, was fit to burst with pride at this procession of his goodly sons, who were to continue after him the life of his body;.
But I am fearful of it because I hear she is learned in the Four Books, and learning has never accompanied beauty in women.
I am never better pleased than when I know a book of mine can be bought for fifty cents or, better still, for twenty-five. No people can be educated or even cultivated until books are cheap enough for everybody to buy.
The narrator refers to a character as “an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them.
You see how loving kindness conquers fear, even in animals. Let this lesson be engraved upon your hearts.
This imperial woman, so diverse and rich in her genius, might have chosen her own greatness had she been able to single one gift above another, but she could not make her own choice of what she loved best to do, and so she did something of each and in all she excelled. As for those affairs of state which had absorbed her until.
He could have been lonely except that he was never lonely, since he had always been alone.
What is the conscience? It is the most highly developed part of the human being, the core of the spirit, the most sensitive, the most tender.
Americans are citizens from the moment they are born, and not when they become twenty-one years of age. By then, if they have not performed the acts of a citizen in a democracy, it is too late. They remain irresponsible and therefore immature. From the first grade on, the child should be taught his duties as a citizen, and given his voice in municipal matters and then in state and nation.
I wish to produce the fruit of my brain for my country’s good. A mere dog may fill the earth with the fruit of his body!
It is better to live than to die, and peace is better than war, and though there are some who deny this as robbers do, the truth remains what it is.
I think not everyone can see the whole picture. It has long been said we each see what we look for. You and I, we look at land and think of seed and harvests. A builder looks at the same land and thinks of houses, and a painter of its colors. The priest sees men only as those who need to be saved, and so naturally he sees most clearly those who need to be saved.
It is but another war somewhere. Who knows what all this fighting to and fro is about? But so it has been since I was a lad and so will it be after I am dead and well I know it.
Yes, but there was the land. Money and food are eaten and gone, and if there is not sun and rain in proportion, there is again hunger.
Mind and body were well or ill together.
It is not that we cannot believe,” he replied. “It is that we do not want anything enough. Faith rises from necessity. We have no necessity.
He had long been her favorite, yet every eunuch knew that the favor of a ruler is less stable than sunlight in early spring. At any moment it can be withdrawn, and as soon can a eunuch’s head tumble from his shoulders.
Ah, because you have suffered is the one reason why you should never make others suffer,” he had said. “Only the small and the mean retaliate for pain.