Chinese Author Quotes

Li Bai

Lu Xun

Du Fu

Mo Yan

Gao Xingjian

Emperor Taizong of Tang

Ba Jin

We can't continue to be like this. Who am I? Your fiancée or your concubine?

If you work hard enough at something, it begins to make itself part of you, even though you do not really like it and know that part isn't real.

Get rid of words, and get rid of meaning, and still there is poetry.

A monkey's transformed body weds
the human mind. Mind is a monkey —
this, the truth profound.

Naive eyes see friends everywhere
Sullen eyes see enemies everywhere
Terrified eyes see traps everywhere
Greedy eyes see gold everywhere
Sorrowful eyes see desolation everywhere
Smiling eyes see brightness everywhere
Two eyes often struggle against each other
One is too naive
The other too sullen
Therefore the eyes behold total confusion
Enemies look like friends
And friends look like enemies.

I am about to scream madly in the office.
Especially when they bring more papers to pile high on my desk.

With a bronze mirror, one can see whether he is properly attired; with history as a mirror, one can understand the rise and fall of a nation; with men as a mirror, one can see whether he is right or wrong. Now I've lost my faithful mirror by the death of Weizheng.

Emperor Taizong of Tang

I remember, when I was young,
How easily my mood changed from sad to gay.
… But now that age comes,
A moment of joy is harder and harder to get.

In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;
The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,
While ravens and kites peck at human entrails,
Carry them up in their flight, and hang them on the branches of dead trees.

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain, Cold Mountain: there's no through trail.

When you collaborate with other people, you tend to regard your own individual contribution as the most important.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

You contemplate and you wander without any worries, between heaven and earth, in your own private world, and in this way you acquire supreme freedom.

Do you know who Karl Marx is? He is this strange little man, long dead, who lived his narrow little life, and somehow managed by the power of his wayward brain to lay hold upon millions of human lives!

My growing environmental awareness only added more fuel to the argument for having no children. And the logic of never-ending consumption didn't just harm the environment, it killed people too.

A sudden cloud formation of birds was swallowed up by the moon, and he was just as suddenly penned in by four walls-the demons' pen.

What do a few lies on TV matter? They can be swallowed, digested and excreted, or follow people when they doze off to sink into oblivion.

Zhang Jie (writer)

This was a good beginning. All the outmoded rules of the hospital were broken. Minds which had been tied down by subservience to foreign experience were now set in motion. People began to speak, to think and to act boldly. A new world opened in front of them. They knew that what they were doing now was something unprecedented which doctors in capitalist countries had not been able to do. They were engaged in a battle to save lives and as the scope of the battle became wider an increasing number of people were drawn in. Later on when a difficulty occurred in the course of treatment they solicited the opinions of many doctors both within and without the hospital, depending on the wisdom of the many to tide over one crisis after another.

If you want to remain at liberty, I suggest you not antagonize your defenders.

You have to reform yourself before reforming society and the world.

A secret, like a chore, always seems to lead to another, one even more troublesome than the first.

I've come to realize that it is much easier to infatuate people with promises, or even to lead them to their own deaths, than it is to awaken them to use their minds.

Zhang Xianliang

Success is not worth rejoicing over, failure is not worth grieving over.

Karma is the root cause of success and failure in every aspect of life.

College education tends to make simple things complicated and hard to understand. What we should do is to teach our children the most essential and simple principles of life and ways to handle problems.