LU XUN

To be suspicious is not a fault. To be suspicious all the time without coming to a conclusion is the defect.

Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.

Hope is like a path in the countryside. Originally, there is nothing - but as people walk this way again and again, a path appears.

When the Chinese suspect someone of being a potential troublemaker, they always resort to one of two methods: they crush him, or they hoist him on a pedestal.

Hope is a path on the mountainside. At first there is no path. But then there are people passing that way. And there is a path.

Though science has given us many marvels, it has also spoiled many of our pleasant dreams.

Like students going to school, the planes on their bombing missions fly over Beijing each morning. And each time I hear their engines attack the air I feel a certain slight tension, as if I were witnessing the invasion of Death, though this heightens my consciousness of the existence of Life.

Discontent is the wheel that moves people forward.

Imagine an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many people fast asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation. But you know since they will die in their sleep, they will not feel the pain of death. Now if you cry aloud to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making those unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you think you are doing them a good turn?

When you talk with famous scholars, the best thing is to pretend that occasionally you do not quite understand them. If you understand too little, you will be despised; if you understand too much, you will be disliked; if you just fail occasionally to understand them, you will suit each other very well.

If men refuse to be kindled, sparks can only burn themselves out, just as paper images and carriages burn out on the street during funerals.

The most horrible thing is not a government that stages public executions, but a government that secretly disposes of its victims.

Men who have not known the horror of death are not likely to be awed by it.

But if a few awake, you can't say there is no hope of destroying the iron house.

Lies written in ink cannot disguise facts written in blood.

The ability to forget the past enables people to free themselves gradually from the pain they once suffered; but it also often makes them repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.

Though love is instinctive, it cannot develop without a certain stimulus and use.

Hope is like a path in the countryside.

But a people unable to reform will not be able to preserve its old culture either.

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

It is in the nature of things that some people should be unlucky enough to get their heads chopped off.

But anyone who thinks themselves genuinely unbiased is bound to be taken in.

I felt that if a man's proposals met with approval, it should encourage him; if they met with opposition, it should make him fight back; but the real tragedy for him was to lift up his voice among the living and meet with no response neither approval nor opposition just as if he were left helpless in a boundless desert.

True, we must dare look things in the face before we dare think, speak, act, or assume responsibility. If we dare not even look, what else are we good for?

Women have a mother-nature and a daughter-nature; there are no women with a wife-nature. The quality of wife is an acquired character; it is a combination of mother and daughter.