From A Chinese Garden of Serenity (1959), by Hung Tzu-ch’eng, translated by Chao Tze-chiang:
Walking along a narrow path, one should leave a margin; tasting rich delicacies, one should share a morsel. These are the happiest ways of dealing with the world.
From Advice to a Young Poet (1949), by Llewelyn Powys.
I will first try to indicate why I told you to go to the sea every day. We are all in danger of being trapped in our environments–a poet is saved from this by his appreciation of the mysteries of earth life–if you every day meditate even for a moment on the beauty and mystery of the sea–you bathe your mind in Eternity. The smell of it, the sound of it, the sight of it should enable you to forget the bath machines and all modern vulgarities and realize that you are looking at what Homer looked at and all the long line of great poets, “Sophocles long ago heard it on the Aegean”. It should become to you a symbol of release and an elixir for the imagination and you should never pass it by with philistine apathy.
P. S. If you don’t have close access to the sea, anything other natural manifestation which is vast or sublime will also work: clouds, mountains, stars, prairie . . .
From Sexus (1949), by Henry Miller.
The reason why [the artist] has such a miserable time of it is because he elects to do his work gratuitously. He forgets, as you say, that he has to live. But that’s really a blessing. It’s much better to be preoccupied with wonderful ideas than with the next meal, or the rent, or a pair of new shoes. Of course when you get to the point where you must eat, and you haven’t anything to eat, then to eat becomes an obsession. But the difference between an artist and the ordinary individual is that when the artist does get a meal he immediately falls back into his own limitless world, and while he’s in that world he’s a king, whereas your ordinary duffer is just a filling station with nothing in between but dust and smoke. And even supposing you’re not an ordinary chap, but a wealthy individual, one who can indulge his tastes, his whims, his appetites: do you suppose for one minute that a millionaire enjoys food or wine or women like a hungry artist does?
From The Three-Cornered World (1958), by Natsume Sōseki.
The so-called pleasures in life derive from material attachments, and thus inevitably contain the seeds of pain. The poet and the artist, however, come to know absolute purity by concerning themselves only with those things which constitute the innermost essence of this world of relativity. They dine on the summer haze, and drink the evening dew. They discuss purple, and weigh the merits of crimson, and when death comes they have no regrets. For them, pleasure does not lie in becoming attached to things, but in becoming a part of them by a process of assimilation. And when at last they succeed in this, they find there is no room to spare for their ego. Thus, having risen out of the quagmire of materialism, they are free to devote themselves to the real essentials of life, and thereby obtain boundless satisfaction.
From A Chinese Garden of Serenity (1959), by Hung Tzu-cheng, translated by Chao Tze-chiang:
The purpose of the superior man is as clear as the blue sky or as bright as the white sun; it must not be kept from being known. But the talent of the superior man is like the jade hidden in a rock or the pearl covered with a shell; it must not easily become known.
From A Chinese Garden of Serenity (1959), by Hung Tzu-cheng, translated by Chao Tze-chiang:
If a man could make his body spirit and appear in the shadow of cloud and mist, he would begin to apprehend that the common clay is a shackle. And if he could hear the tender voice of his inner self in the chirping of birds, he would be able to perceive that passions are spears.
From A Chinese Garden of Serenity (1959), by Hung Tzu-cheng, translated by Chao Tze-chiang:
While soaring in the sky and over the earth, a roc felt that its journey was narrow and short. While perching on an old pine, shrouded by a cloud, a crane knows that its dream is serene and leisurely.
From The Dharma Bums (1958), by Jack Kerouac.
I bless you, all living things, I bless you in the endless past, I bless you in the endless present, I bless you in the endless future, amen.
From The Vision of Asia (1933), by L. Cranmer-Byng.
Poets are essentially the apostles of freedom, but the freedom of which they dream is the freedom of ordered sequence and adjustment into the coherent and sustained harmonies. A fortuitous combination of chords and discords, of melodies that have no relation to each other, is not freedom but the anarchy of contending forces. And all the harmonies are combined and contained in the greater rhythm of life. There are harmonies of type both human and sub-human, and the rarer harmony of which Shakespere speaks:
‘There’s not the smallest orb that thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed Cherubims;
Such harmony is in immortal souls. …”
From A Chinese Garden of Serenity (1959), by Hung Tzu-ch’eng, translated by Chao Tze-chiang:
The mind is like a bright pearl. If obstructed by material desires, it is like a pearl covered with mud and sand. But if clasped by passions, it is like a pearl adorned with silver and gold. Accordingly, a scholar is afraid not of an unclean malady, but of the difficult cure of a clean malady; and he fears not a barrier in events, but the difficult removal of a barrier in principles.
From Principles of Chinese Painting (1947), by George Rowley.
Shen Tsung-chien listed four ways of developing a personality of high quality, namely: “To purify your heart in order to eliminate vulgar worries, to read books widely in order to understand the realm of the principles (li), to renounce early reputation in order to become far-reaching, to associate with cultivated people in order to rectify your style.”
The first and third ways are Taoist and the second and fourth are Confucian. Another writer, in discussing cultivation or elegance, which was the supreme Confucian quality in both the painter and his painting, enumerated four Taoist virtues as the roads to elegance, namely: to be “cranky”–going against the world, “foolish”–forgetting about the world, “poor”–being contrary to the world, and “remote”–being far from the ways of the world and thus able to preserve elegance.
From A Chinese Garden of Serenity (1959), by Hung Tzu-ch’eng, translated by Chao Tze-chiang:
Where it is rancid and nasty, flies and mosquitoes crowd in to suck; where it is sweet and fragrant, bees and butterflies invade in swarms. Therefore the superior man neither undertakes a foul deed nor seeks to make a famous name. He keeps his pristine spirit and never displays his brilliance.