Zhuang Zhou

Do not assume anything. Clear your mind must be if you are to discover the real villains behind this plot.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

Men love to wonder and that is the seed of our science.

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.

People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow, but there is something in it so like virtue, that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved.

The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

Fidelity has enfranchised slaves, and adopted servants to be sons.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.

There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is more or less an exception to the general rule.