Bai Juyi Quotes

The wise man who has charge of governing the empire should know the cause of disorder before he can put it in order. Unless he knows its cause, he cannot regulate it.

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

Suppose we try to locate the cause of disorder, we shall find it lies in the want of mutual love.

Gautama Buddha

A masterpiece of the first order in Chinese literature.

When you meet the one among the millions, when amid millions of years, across the borderless wastes of time, you happen to catch him or her, neither a step too early nor a step too late, what else is there to do except to ask softly: "So you're here, too?

Destiny was superb
it spoke among mountains and gray cumuli
like castles in the sky,
swollen with heat,
with rain,
with harvests,
with infinite richness.
…

I am astonished about those people who are ordered to prepare their provisions, then the start of the journey is announced, however they remain unmindful in their vain discussions and fruitless deeds.

Indigenous people mean traitors, Indigenous people are the project of Prothom Alo and India. The ownership of this country (mountains, plains) is equal for everyone.

He was silent for a long while. Then: 'You do, sometimes, remind me of the kind of man who is tempted to put himself in prison in order to avoid being hit by a car.

James Baldwin was born for truth. It called upon him to tell it on the mountains, to preach it in Harlem, to sing it on the Left Bank in Paris. His honesty and courage would lead him to see truth and to write truth in poetry, drama, fiction, and essay. He was a giant.

I remember that when we began our friendship, our minds were full of noble thoughts and we often thought of living a quiet life in the mountains.

Ironically, it was not in his nihilistic view of Buddhism but in such ideas as amor fati and the Dionysian as the overcoming of nihilism that Nietzsche came closest to Buddhism, and especially to Mahāyāna.

If the rulers sincerely desire the empire to be wealthy and dislike to have it poor, desire to have it orderly and dislike to have it chaotic, they should bring about universal love and mutual aid. This is the way of the sage-kings and the way to order for the world, and it should not be neglected.

To Xeniades, who had purchased Diogenes at the slave market, he said, "Come, see that you obey orders.

Padmasambhava defined the future of Tibet, planting the seeds of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which would come to flourish over the next millennium. Padmasambhava taught that past and present are interrelated, connected to each other in one’s present experience.