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.
The man who says to me, “Believe as I do, or God will damn thee,” will presently say, “Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate thee.”
Voltaire, in On superstition
The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel proust
The translation of a poem having any depth ends by being one of two things: Either it is the expression of the translator, virtually a new poem, or it is as it were a photograph, as exact as possible, of one side of the statue.
Ezra pound
The people are of supreme importance to the ruler, food is of supreme importance to the people.
Chinese adage
All translators face two choices: leave the reader in peace and drag the author closer, or leave the author in peace and drag the reader closer.
Friedrich schleiermacher (1768-1834) [Referenced in Twenty-Nine GOODBYES, ed. by timothy billings]
Diogenes Sitting in His Tub by Jean-Leon Gerome (1860)
Of what use for us is a man who, although he has long practiced philosophy, has never upset anyone?
Diogenes of sinope on Plato, according to themistius
The superstition that we must drive from the Earth is that which, making a tyrant of God, invites men to become tyrants.
Voltaire in On Superstition
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
T.S. Eliot in Tradition and the Individual talent
What’s the difference between a king and a poor man if they would both end the same bundle of white bones.
Zhuangzi
The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
Carl sagan (Note: There are variations on this quote that long predate Sagan’s)
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
You live off the crumbs that fall from the festive table of my genius.
Kurban Said in Ali and Nino [Not so much wisdom as a wicked burn]
To roam Giddily and be everywhere, but at home, Such freedom doth a banishment become.
John donne in a Poetic letter to rowland woodward
Lions are not the slaves of those who feed them, it is the feeders, rather, who are the lion’s slaves. For fear is the mark of a slave, and wild beasts make men fearful.
We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or someone’s intention.
Daniel kahneman; Thinking, Fast and slow
If you win, do not boast of your victory; if you lose, do not be discouraged. When it is safe, do not become careless; when it is dangerous, do not fear. Simply continue down the path ahead.
Kanō Jigorō; Founder of Jūdō
A writer makes new life in the void, knocks on silence to make a sound, binds space and time on a sheet of silk and pours out a river from an inch-sized heart.
Lu Ji; Wen Fu (261 – 303)
The worst kind of Virtue never stops striving for Virtue, and so never achieves Virtue.
Laozi
Moonlight floods the whole sky from horizon to horizon. // How much it can fill your room depends on its windows.
"The ignorant speak, while the wise keep silent." I read the words of Laozi. But if Laozi knew the Way, Why did he write those five thousand characters?
Tiger Riding for Beginners 