Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble?
george bernard shaw, PygMalion
Refrain from talk of others’ shortcomings; don’t rest on your strengths. [罔谈彼短; 靡恃己长.]
Thousand Character classic [千字文]
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
george bernard shaw, Man and superman
A child is the most reliable measure of time. His daily growth is proof of your daily ageing and decline. The child’s gains are your losses, and the closer a child gets to anything, the farther you withdraw, as though you were tied to one another on opposite spokes of a wheel and the wheel, without your noticing it, turns. Dawn for the child is dusk for you.
Otar chiladze, A Man was going down the road
We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life.
Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
NOTABLE MENTIONS:
We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.”
Philip k. dick
“The Wu and the Yue peoples hate each other. But in the same boat in a storm, they work together like left and right hands.”
SunZi in The ART of War
“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life – and travel – leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks – on your body or on your heart – are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.”
anthony bourdain
What allows great kings and generals to win, more frequently than ordinary men, is foreknowledge. Foreknowledge cannot be attained by spirits or deduced or calculated.”
Sunzi in The ART of war
“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
walt whitman; Leaves of grass; “I sing the body electric”
Strong in their softness are the sprays of the wisteria creeper; The pine in its hardness is broken by the weak snow.
Saying of Master Jukyo as Translated by Trevor Leggett in Zen and the Ways
When there is mutual ignorance, confidence indeed is king.
Trevor leggett; Zen and the Ways
Do not see the gate and think it is the house. The house is something which is reached by passing through and going beyond the gate.
YAgyu Munenori’s Art of War (As translated by trevor leggett in Zen and the ways)
Students of the Ways must see clearly that in an untrained man the intellect is like a barrister. It argues clearly and logically, but the aim is not truth, but to reach a predetermined conclusion.
The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands and feet Proportion.
As the air to a bird, or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.
The crow wished everything was black, the owl that everything was white.
Exuberance is Beauty.
If the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning.
Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
Where man is not, nature is barren.
Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not to be believed.
Enough! or Too much.
* * * The ancient poets animated all sensible objects with Gods and Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the Genius of each city and country, placing it under its mental deity.
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of and enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects.
Thus began Priesthood.
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things.
Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.
Humans are good intuitive grammarians but poor intuitive statisticians.
Daniel kahneman in Thinking, fast and slow
The highest form of leadership is to attack the enemy’s plans; the next highest is to attack the cohesion of their forces; the next is to attack their troops, and the worst is to besiege their cities.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 