Tao Te Ching
Tao Te Ching
Chapter 76The Soft and Flexible
Chapter 76
When first born, we’re small and weak;
The living are soft and flexible.
When we die, we become hard and stiff;
The dead are rigid, unmoving.
The greenery - grasses, plants and trees
Growing are tender and supple,
Dead are dry and brittle.
And so the strong and hard
Go along with dying;
The open to change and flexible with living.
When an army becomes inflexible,
It suffers defeat.
A tree that won’t bend
Easily breaks in storms.
The hard and strong will fail,
The open-hearted prevail.
Commentary
“The green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm.”
Comments: Click to comment
“the most important part of a task is the beginning, for that is the time when character is formed, when impressions readily taken.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Can you stop looking to others and focus on your innermost self? Can you return to the beginning of the world and be like a newborn baby?”
Comments: Click to comment
“The path of perennial victory is weakness. The path of perennial defeat is strength. These two are easy to recognize, but people remain oblivious to them.”
Comments: Click to comment
“It isn’t hard for an army to achieve victory. But it is hard to hold on to victory. There is no great army that has not brought on its own defeat through its victories.”
Comments: Click to comment
“I will be waiting for your silence to break, your soul to shake, and your love to wake!”
Comments: Click to comment
“Seeing that the living are soft and the dead are hard, we can infer that those whose virtue is hard and those whose actions are forceful die before their time, while those who are soft and weak are able to preserver their lives.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The more sand that escapes from our life’s hourglass, the more clearly we can see through it”
Comments: Click to comment
“I will never be an old man. To me old age is always 15 years older than I am.”
Comments: Click to comment
“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
Comments: Click to comment
“There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else.”
Comments: Click to comment
“your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on… accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.”
Comments: Click to comment
“These are my two drops of rain
Waiting on the window-pane…
All the best and all the worst
Comes from which of them is first…
John is there, and John has won!
Look! I told you! Here's the sun!”
Comments: Click to comment
“The appearance of things changes according to the emotions; and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Children understand… All grown-ups were once children but only few of them remember it… I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them… Only the children know what they are looking for.”
Comments: Click to comment
“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
Comments: Click to comment
“tanks and tombstones are not very adequate role models… to be alive is to be vulnerable.”
Comments: Click to comment
“You go back. You search for what made you happy when you were smaller. We are all grown up children, really... So one should go back and search for what was loved and found to be real.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world.”
Comments: Click to comment
“When we see things as they are, they make sense to us: the way leaves move when they are blown by the wind, the way rocks get wet when there are snowflakes sitting on them. We see how things display their harmony and their chaos at the same time. So we are never limited by beauty alone, but we appreciate all sides of reality properly.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The first will be last and the last will be first.”
Comments: Click to comment
“How different this world would be if our leaders spent as much time in their gardens as they do in their war rooms.”
Comments: Click to comment
Comments (0)
Log in to comment.