Tao Te Ching
Middle Way
Quotes (76)
“He who neither rejoices, nor hates, nor sorrows, nor desires and who has renounced good and evil is thus fit to become one with Brahman.”
“Avoiding extremes, the wise gain the experience of the Middle Path which produces insight, calms, and leads to higher knowledge, enlightenment.”
“A superior man in dealing with the world is not for anything or against anything.”
“Maintain perfect balance in each and every set of circumstances and thus keep to steadfast principle at all times.” “Completion of the self is true goodness…the Way that unites external and internal.”
“Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs, therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity or undue depression in adversity.”
“We sit around in our shops denouncing the present order but we perceive that even badly constituted democracies are responsible for fewer disasters than oligarchies. But Athens ruined itself by carrying to excess the principles of liberty and equality, by training the citizens in such fashion that they looked upon insolence as democracy, lawlessness as liberty, impudence of speech as equality, and license to do what they pleased as happiness.”
“The wise do not rejoice when they succeed or lament when they fail because they know that conditions aren’t constant”
“Birth and death, profit and loss, success and failure, health and sickness – the Master maintains his balance... he lets things go through their changes and stays focused on what is real.”
“The master uses his skill to harmonize with both sides which makes all things equal. This is called 'walking on two paths at once.'”
“Sages do not let their desires disturb harmony… when they are happy, they do not rejoice too much, and when they are sad, they do not grieve too much.”
“Balance is the beginning of the Way. Emptiness is the heart of the way.”
“All forms of one-sidedness are deformities of mind and lead to indulgencies of folly.”
“Who so cultivates the golden mean avoids the poverty of a hovel and the envy of a palace.”
“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”
“Your own purpose should seek harmony with nature itself for this is the true road to freedom... Understand that nature as a whole is ordered according to reason, but that not everything in nature is reasonable.”
“If we hold exclusively to Emptiness, we deny the entire causal world;
All is then attributed to chance, with no ruling principle, inviting evil to prevail.
The same error occurs when one holds exclusively to the manifested, denying the Emptiness;
That would be like throwing oneself into the flames in order to avoid being drowned in the water.”
“When you aren't either attached to or detached from, you enjoy perfect unobstructed freedom, the seat of enlightenment.”
“The sage institutes education as a way to enable people to transform themselves, arrive at the Middle Way, and rest there.”
“Yin and yang take turns. The four seasons come and go. The moon waxes and wanes. All things have their time. They don’t have to be summoned to come.”
“If those above take too much, those below will be impoverished. If those above use too much force, those below will rebel.”
“Everyone knows about daring to act but not about daring not to act. Those who dare to act walk on the edge of a knife Those who dare not to act walk down the middle of a path.”
“If you follow regulations, keeping the rules, you tie yourself without rope but if you act any which way without inhibition you're a heretical demon.”
“That both of these are vices is well seen—
To trust all men or all men disbelieve;
But no vice enters in the golden mean.”
“The alternation of contraries beautifies and sustains the world... by joining extremes, the more effective middle way is found.”
“Never go to extremes or drain anything to the dregs. If you push too hard for what’s right, it becomes wrong; if you milk a cow too much, you draw blood instead of milk.”
“Custom is the tyrant from which nothing frees us... But being compelled to live under its foolish laws, the wise man is never the first to follow nor the last to keep”
“Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.”
“The means of obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest possible order...is the means of obtaining as much perfection as possible.”
“Alike fantastic, if too new, or old;
Be not the first by whom the new are try'd,
Not yet the last to lay the old aside.”
“the sprouts of living potential grow when the energies of yin and yang commune.”
“True yin and true yang naturally form a couple and from striving enter into nonstriving, from effort arrive at spontaneity completely realizing essence and arriving at the true meaning of life.”
“Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice.”
“Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the center of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the sure point at which it can remain at rest.”
“The line between failure and success is so fine. . . that we are often on the line and do not know it.”
“The center cannot hold, The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
“The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.”
“Every community is faced with two dangers, anarchy and despotism... This led Locke to the doctrine of division of powers, and of checks and balances.”
“opposites always balance on the scales – a sign of high culture. One-sidedness, though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism.”
“The daimon of creativity has ruthlessly had its way with me... When the daimon is at work, one is always too close and too far. Only when it is silent can one achieve moderation.”
“An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight... the truly wise person is colorblind.”
“Harmony of mind and body—that was the Greeks' supreme ideal. Hypertrophy of one to the detriment of the other they considered barbaric. When Greece began to decline, the athlete's body began at the same to to hypertrophy and to kill his mind.”
“all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished”
“Civilization, like life, destroys what it has perfected... alternation between centralized and decentralized power is one of the cyclical rhythms of history”
“Excess in some form or another is probably inseparable from the highest human achievements. But this fact takes away nothing from the value of the Golden Mean... Moderation and common sense are humble, homely virtues; but they are the highest to which most of us can aspire.”
“When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that’s wisdom. When I look outside and see that I am everything, that’s love. Between these two my life turns.”
“if time did not intervene, the polar forces facing each other on the same axis would balance each other so completely that all movement, and with it all development or change, would cease.”
“The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it.”
“Our people would be quite shocked by having to declare that one policy was completely right and another completely wrong.”
“If I could put it into a very few words, I should say that our prevalent belief is in moderation. We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excesses of all kinds—even including, if you will pardon the paradox, excess of virtue itself.”
“For all objects and experiences there is a quantity that has an optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived.”
“For all objects and experiences, there is a quantity that has optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived.”
“Poor Icarus fell into the water—but Daedalus, who flew the middle way, succeeded in getting to the other shore… When you follow the path of your desire and enthusiasm and emotion; keep your mind in control and don’t let it pull you compulsively into disaster”
“Freedom is only part of the story and half the truth.... That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplanted by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”
“no matter how highly developed modern civilized life is, it can never compare with the perfection of a life in harmony with nature.”
“Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.”
“He who is aware of the Male but keeps to the Female... has the Eternal power which never fails.”
“I’d always rather err on the side of openness. But there’s a difference between optimum and maximum openness, and fixing that boundary is a judgment call.”
“The Buddha advocated a 'middle way' yet this was only after a preliminary course of extremes... As to the way of escaping delusion, there is no division of opinion: Go to extremes. That is the first necessity.”
“We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.”
“In this world there is no absolute good, no absolute evil. Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa… The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil… Indeed, balance itself is the good.”
“The most interesting aspect to me is the other Shangri-La alluded to in Lost Horizon, a state of mind, one of moderation and acceptance.”
“The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.”
“Keats is not content to give either of these competing drives a simple victory. He does not say that beauty is defeated by the inevitability of death, or that death is an illusion that beauty’s radiance can dispel. Instead, the poems are a series of sustained balances... To be defeated by sorrow, in this poem, is to triumph over it. The poet’s reward is no longer to collect a trophy from posterity but to become a trophy himself—as though his suffering and his pleasure were an offering to the gods.”
Sources
Doctrine of the Mean, Maintaining Perfect Balance, Zhongyong 中庸
by Zisi
Confucius' grandson and early influence on Neo-Confucianism
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