Zhang Zhidong Quotes

Whatever I may be, I want to be elsewhere than on paper. My art and my industry have been employed in making myself good for something; my studies, in teaching me to do, not to write. I have put all my efforts into forming my life. That is my trade and my work.

Historically, the East was more concerned with understanding the mind and the West was more involved in understanding matter.

The object of all education should be to increase the usefulness of man - usefulness to himself and others.

The greatest good [a man] can do is to cultivate himself in order that he may be of greater use to humanity.

If a man lose his balance, and immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may be a good wheel or pin, but he is not a cultivated man.

The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style.... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.

That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.

The lover of education labors first of all to educate himself.

Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

A civilization is only a way of life. A culture is the way of making that way of life beautiful. So culture is your office here in America, and as no stream can rise higher than its source, so you can give no more or better to architecture than you are. So why not go to work on yourselves, to make yourselves, in quality, what you would have your buildings be?

We Russians have assigned ourselves no other task in life but the cultivation of our own personalities, and when we're barely past childhood, we set to work to cultivate them, those unfortunate personalities.

A gentleman is not born but crafted. He had to work on himself in the same way as a sculptor shaped a rough stone and made it a thing of beauty.

If the East loves infinity, the West delights in boundaries.

We must cultivate our own garden.

If a man wants to be of the greatest possible value to his fellow-creature s let him begin the long, solitary task of perfecting himself.

Those who are enlightened never stop forging themselves.

What does learning mean: accumulating knowledge or transforming your life?

The West is concentration of the mind: the East is meditation of the mind. The West is thinking: the East is non-thinking. The West is mind: the East is no-mind.

When one cultivates to the utmost the principles of his nature, and exercises them on the principle of reciprocity, he is not far from the path.

He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power.

In order to cultivate yourself and to drop no lower than the level of the milieu in which you have landed, it is not enough to read Pickwick and memorize a monologue from Faust... You need to work continually day and night, to read ceaselessly, to study, to exercise your will... Each hour is precious.

Titles or awards are not the mark of your success. They are the beginning of a life-long sadhana.

The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.

The world is sown with good; but unless I turn my glad thoughts into practical living and till my own field. I cannot reap a kernel of the good.