Water seems so soft, weak, yielding
Yet easily overcomes the hard and strong.
It has no equal.
The soft overcomes the hard,
The weak overcomes the strong.
This is easy to understand
But rarely put into practice.
And so the wise teach:
Only leaders who take responsibility
For people’s disgrace;
Only leaders who take on people’s misfortunes
Are worthy of leadership.
The truest words always sound wrong.
“Water reaches its goal by flowing continuously. It fills up every depression before it flows on… So likewise in teaching others everything depends on consistency, for it is only through repetition that the pupil makes the material his own.”
Comments: Click to comment
“If I commit an offense, it has nothing to do with my people. If my people commit an offense, the offense rests with me.”
Comments: Click to comment
“If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children.”
Comments: Click to comment
“I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Everyone wants to be first, while I alone want to be last, which means to endure the world’s disgrace.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Rulership was set up because the strong oppressed the weak, the many did violence to the few, the cunning fooled the simple, the bold attacked the timid, people kept knowledge to themselves and did not teach, people accumulated wealth and did not share it. So the institution of rulership was set up to equalize and unify them.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Though the bamboo forest is dense, water flows through it freely.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The nature of water is to stay low, to not struggle, and to take on the shape of its container. Thus nothing is weaker. Yet despite such weakness it can bore through rocks. Rocks, however, cannot wear down water.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Since water can bore through rock and float metal, there is nothing it does not conquer.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Be praised my Lord through Sister Water; she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.”
Comments: Click to comment
“I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.”
Comments: Click to comment
“When nations grow old the Arts grow cold; And commerce settles on every tree.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The cheapest sort of pride is national pride... it argues that he has no qualities of his own... Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.”
Comments: Click to comment
“He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Suffering — how divine it is, how misunderstood! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues.”
Comments: Click to comment
“I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Comments: Click to comment
“We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”
Comments: Click to comment
“We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job.”
Comments: Click to comment
Comments: Click to comment
“Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy.”
Comments: Click to comment
“If you think in terms of people divided up into countries, you won't follow me. The idea of countries is going by the boards. Young people are getting wonderfully uprooted and they're too strong to get sucked into this 'country' crap.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. 'Patriotism' is its cult... Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.”
Comments: Click to comment
“No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom… From an economic point of view, the central concept of wisdom is permanence. We must study an economics of permanence.”
Comments: Click to comment
“It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Our mind is like a clear glass of water. If we put salt into water, it becomes salt water; sugar, it becomes sugar water, shit, it becomes shit water. But originally the water is clear.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The Buddhist idea of a politician is not so much one of a con man or of a businessman who wins favor with everybody, but someone who simply does what is necessary… having a sense of responsibility to society.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do…
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...”
Comments: Click to comment
“Whenever we cling to a particular side of reality, it’s we who are the monkeys, losing ourselves in outrage or partial delight… when the mind is clear, each is an occasion for rejoicing.”
Comments: Click to comment
Comments (0)
Log in to comment.