Great Throughts Treasury

"Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought."

"Make love! He disliked the phrase. Could one make love?"

"Man was lost if he went to a usurer, for the interest ran faster than a tiger upon him."

"Many people lose the small joys hoping for great happiness."

"Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession."

"Men of action, whose minds are too busy with the day's work to see beyond it. They are essential men, we cannot do without them, and yet we must not allow all our vision to be bound by the limitations of men of action."

"Men would rather be starving and free than fed in bonds."

"Music is not technique and melody, but the meaning of life itself, infinitely sorrowful and unbearably beautiful."

"Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors. They are the oldest civilized people on earth. Their civilization passes through phases but its basic characteristics remain the same. They yield, they bend to the wind, but they never break."

"Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old."

"Of course imagination is the beginning of creation. Without imagination there can be no creation."

"Once the 'what' is decided, the 'how' always follows. We must not make the 'how' an excuse for not facing and accepting the 'what.'"

"One does not live half a life in Asia without return. When it would be I did not know, nor even where it would be, or to what cause. In our changing world nothing changes more than geography. The friendly country of China, the home of my childhood and youth, is for the time being forbidden country. I refuse to call it enemy country. The people in my memory are too kind and the land too beautiful."

"Our bodies can be mobilized by law and police and men with guns, if necessary ? but where shall we find that which will make us believe in what we must do, so that we can fight through to victory?"

"Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy."

"Out of the woman's great brown breast the milk gushed forth for the child, milk as white as snow, and when the child suckled at the one breast it flowed like a fountain from the other, ans she let it flow. There was more than enough for the child, greedy though he was, life enough for many children, and she let it flow out carelessly, conscious of her abundance. There was always more. Sometimes she lifted her breast and let it flow out upon the ground to save her clothing, and it sank into the earth and made a soft, dark, rich spot in the field. The child fat and good-natured and ate of the inexhaustible life his mother gave him."

"Out of this folk mind, turned into stories and crowded with thousands of years of life, grew, literally, the Chinese novel. For these novels changed as they grew. If, as I have said, there are no single names attached beyond question to the great novels of China, it is because no one hand wrote them. From beginning as a mere tale, a story grew through succeeding versions, into a structure built by many hands."

"People are lonely when they dream."

"Profound as race prejudice is against the Negro American, it is not practically as far-reaching as the prejudice against women. For stripping away the sentimentality which makes Mother's Day and Best American Mother Contests, the truth is that women suffer all the effects of a minority."

"Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together."

"Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes."

"Somehow I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself."

"Story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free."

"Strangely enough, there were certain scholars who envied the freedom of obscurity, and who, burdened with certain private sorrows which they dared not tell anyone, or who perhaps wanting only a holiday from the weariness of the sort of art they had themselves created, wrote novels too, under assumed and humble names. And when they did so they put aside pedantry and wrote as simply and naturally as any common novelist."

"The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband's bravery is only bravado, that his strength is only a uniform, that his power is but a gun in the hands of a fool."

"The Chinese novel was written primarily to amuse the common people. And when I say amuse I do not mean only to make them laugh, though laughter is also one of the aims of the Chinese novel. I mean amusement in the sense of absorbing and occupying the whole attention of the mind. I mean enlightening that mind by pictures of life and what that life means."

"The common sense of people will surely prove to them someday that mutual support and cooperation are only sensible for the security and happiness of all. Such faith keeps me continually ready and purposeful with energy to do what one person can towards shaping the environment in which the human being can grow with freedom."

"The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual, a vitality great beyond all the needs of his own living ? an energy which no single life can consume."

"The feet bear the burden of the body, the head the burden of the mind, and the heart the burden of the spirit."

"The instinct which creates the arts is not the same as that which produces art. The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual, a vitality great beyond all the needs of his own living ? an energy which no single life can consume. This energy consumes itself then in creating more life, in the form of music, painting, writing, or whatever is its most natural medium of expression. Nor can the individual keep himself from this process, because only by its full function is he relieved of the burden of this extra and peculiar energy ? an energy at once physical and mental, so that all his senses are more alert and more profound than another man's, and all his brain more sensitive and quickened to that which his senses reveal to him in such abundance that actuality overflows into imagination. It is a process proceeding from within. It is the heightened activity of every cell of his being, which sweeps not only himself, but all human life about him, or in him, in his dreams, into the circle of its activity."

"The people of China forged their own literature apart from letters. And today this is what lives, to be part of what is to come, and all the formal literature, which was called art, is dead. The plots of these novels are often incomplete, the love interest is often not brought to solution, heroines are often not beautiful and heroes often are not brave. Nor has the story always an end; sometimes it merely stops, in the way life does, in the middle of it when death is not expected."

"The relationships between the five elements. What are the five elements? They are wood, fire, earth, metal, water. These create, and also destroy, each other... On the side of creation, wood creates fire; fire, as ash, creates earth. In earth there is metal: metal melts to become liquid. Water creates trees, or wood. On the side of destruction, wood consumes water through trees; earth can stop water; water destroys fire; fire destroys metal; but metal in an instrument destroys wood....Within this circle of creation and destruction man must live harmoniously, with ebb and flow, in tune with all that exists."

"The street is noisy and the men and women are not perfect in the technique of their expression as the statues are. They are ugly and imperfect, incomplete even as human beings, and where they come from and where they go cannot be known. But they are people and therefore infinitely to be preferred to those who stand upon the pedestals of art."

"The waters of the genius of story gushed out as they would, however the natural rocks allowed and the trees persuaded, and only common people came and drank and found rest and pleasure. For the novel in China was the peculiar product of the common people. And it was solely their property."

"The wild winds had been sown and the whirlwinds were gathering... and I was reaping what I had not sown... None of us could escape the history of the centuries before any of us had been born, and with which we had nothing to do. We had not, I think, ever committed even a mild unkindness against a Chinese, and certainly we had devoted ourselves to justice for them, we had taken sides against our own race again and again for their sakes, sensitive always to injustices which others had committed and were still committing. But nothing mattered today, neither the kindness nor the cruelty. We were in hiding for our lives because we were white."

"Then Wang Lung turned to the woman and looked at her for the first time. She had a square, honest face, a short, broad nose with large black nostrils, and her mouth was wide as a gash in her face. Her eyes were small and of a dull black in color, and were filled with some sadness that was not clearly expressed. It was a face that seemed habitually silent and unspeaking, as though it could not speak if it would. She bore patiently Wang Lung?s look, without embarrassment or response, simply waiting until he had seen her. He saw that it was true there was not beauty of any kind in her face?a brown, common, patient face. But there were no pock-marks on her dark skin, nor was her lip split. In her ears he saw his rings hanging, the gold-washed rings he had bought, and on her hands were the rings he had given her. He turned away with secret exultation. Well, he had his woman!"

"There is something to be said for losing one?s possessions, after nothing can be done about it. I had loved my Nanking home and the little treasures it had contained, the lovely garden I had made, my life with friends and students. Well, that was over. I had nothing at all now except the old clothes I stood in. I should have felt sad, and I was quite shocked to realize that I did not feel sad at all. On the contrary, I had a lively sense of adventure merely at being alive and free, even of possessions. No one expected anything of me. I had no obligations, no duties, no tasks. I was nothing but a refugee, someone totally different from the busy young woman I had been. I did not even care that the manuscript of my novel was lost. Since everything else was gone, why not that?"

"There was an old abbot in one temple and he said something of which I think often and it was this, that when men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place."

"There was no need to hurry that future?yet the length of his own youth pressed upon him. Whatever he was to do next he wanted to begin now. But how to begin and on what?"

"There will be no real content among American women unless they are made and kept more ignorant or unless they are given equal opportunity with men to use what they have been taught. And American men will not be really happy until their women are."

"These Chinese novels are not perfect according to Western standards. They are not always planned from beginning to end, nor are they compact, any more than life is planned or compact. They are often too long, too full of incident, too crowded with character, a medley of fact and fiction as to material, and a medley of romance and realism as to method, so that an impossible event of magic or dream may be described with such exact semblance of detail that one is compelled to belief against all reason"

"They must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating."

"This scroll, five hundred years old and more, had been inspired by her favorite, the great Wang Wei, master of landscape art, who had painted the scenes from his own home, where he lived for thirty years before he died. Now behind the palace walls on this winter?s day, where she could see only sky and falling snow, Tzu His gazed upon the green landscapes of continuing spring. One landscape melted into another as slowly she unrolled the scroll, so that she might dwell upon every detail of tree and brook and distant hillside. So did she, in imagination, pass beyond the high walls which enclosed her, and she traveled through a delectable country, beside flowing brooks and spreading lakes, and following the ever-flowing river she crossed over wooden bridges and climbed the stony pathways upon a high mountainside and thence looked down a gorge to see a torrent fed by still higher springs, and breaking into waterfalls as it traveled toward the plains. Down from the mountain again she came, past small villages nestling in pine forests and into the warmer valleys among bamboo groves, and she paused in a poet?s pavilion, and so reached at last the shore where the river lost itself in a bay. There among the reeds a fisherman?s boat rose and fell upon the rising tide. Here the river ended, its horizon the open sea and the misted mountains of infinity. This scroll, Lady Miao had once told her, was the artist?s picture of the human soul, passing through the pleasantest scenes of earth to the last view of the unknown future, far beyond."

"This was his mind, a storehouse, a computer programmed to life, minute by minute, hour by hour, day and night."

"Throw eggs at a rock, and though one uses all the eggs in the world, the rock remains the same."

"To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death."

"To shut one's door while others suffer, to care only for one's own, disclaiming responsibility for humanity, is to destroy all good impulse and to build up a deadly selfishness which will be a boomerang in its effect upon ourselves. Let our own children see the opportunity now theirs for Americanism in the best and traditional sense. There was never a better hour than this to be an American. May 1940, Christian Herald."

"To take each day as a separate page, to be read carefully, savoring all of the details, this is best for me, I think."

"To the Americans, Communism is a crime. They will have none of it. - But why, when it is ours, not theirs? I suppose this American concern with a form of government springs from their own history. Their ancestors fled from Europe to escape tyranny from their ancient rulers. Freedom was their dream. To them, therefore, tyranny is endemic in Communism. They will have none of it. It is not we who are Chinese whom they hate. It is the tyranny they imagine."

"Wandering is never waste, dear boy,' he said. 'While you wander you will find much to wonder about, and wonder is the first step to creation."