“Water reaches its goal by flowing continuously. It fills up every depression before it flows on… So likewise in teaching others everything depends on consistency, for it is only through repetition that the pupil makes the material his own.”

— Fu Xi 伏羲 1 via Richard Wilhelm, Hexagram 29
Emperor/shaman progenitor of civilization symbol
from I Ching

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“If I commit an offense, it has nothing to do with my people. If my people commit an offense, the offense rests with me.”

— Emperor Shun 帝舜 2294 – 2184 BCE
(Dìshùn)
The highest model of a good ruler

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“If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children.”

— Confucius 孔丘 551 – 479 BCE
(Kongzi, Kǒng Zǐ)
History's most influential "failure"

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“I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.”

— Socrates 469 – 399 BCE
One of the most powerful influences on Western Civilization

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“I am a citizen of the world.”

— Diogenes 412 – 323 BCE
(of Sinope)

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“Everyone wants to be first, while I alone want to be last, which means to endure the world’s disgrace.”

— Chuang Tzu 莊周 369 – 286 BCE
(Zhuangzi)

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“Rulership was set up because the strong oppressed the weak, the many did violence to the few, the cunning fooled the simple, the bold attacked the timid, people kept knowledge to themselves and did not teach, people accumulated wealth and did not share it. So the institution of rulership was set up to equalize and unify them.”

— Liú Ān 劉安 1 via Thomas Cleary
(Huainanzi)
from Huainanzi

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“Though the bamboo forest is dense, water flows through it freely.”

— Jianzhi Sengcan 鑑智僧璨 529 – 606 CE
(Jiànzhì Sēngcàn)

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“The nature of water is to stay low, to not struggle, and to take on the shape of its container. Thus nothing is weaker. Yet despite such weakness it can bore through rocks. Rocks, however, cannot wear down water.”

— Xuanzong 武隆基 685 – 756 CE
(Hsuan-Tsung or Wu Longji)

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“Since water can bore through rock and float metal, there is nothing it does not conquer.”

— Wang Zhen 809 – 859 CE
from Daodejing Lunbing Yaoyishu, The Tao of War

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“Be praised my Lord through Sister Water; she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.”

— Francis of Assisi 1181 – 1226 CE via Stephen Mitchell
from Canticle of the Sun

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“I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712 – 1778 CE

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“When nations grow old the Arts grow cold; And commerce settles on every tree.”

— William Blake 1757 – 1827 CE

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“The cheapest sort of pride is national pride... it argues that he has no qualities of his own... Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860 CE
from Parerga and Paralipomena, "Appendices" and "Omissions"

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“The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.”

— John Stuart Mill 1806 – 1873 CE

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“He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900 CE

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“Suffering — how divine it is, how misunderstood! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues.”

— Anatole France 1844 – 1924 CE
(Jacques Anatole Thibault)
from The Garden of Epicurus

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“I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity.”

— Rabindranath Tagore 1861 – 1941 CE

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“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

— W.B. (William Butler) Yeats 1865 – 1939 CE

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“We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.”

— G. K. Chesterton 1874 – 1936 CE

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“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”

— Albert Einstein 1879 – 1955 CE

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“We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt 1884 – 1962 CE

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“Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself. ”

— T. S. Eliot 1888 – 1965 CE

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“Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy.”

— Aldous Huxley 1894 – 1963 CE

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“If you think in terms of people divided up into countries, you won't follow me. The idea of countries is going by the boards. Young people are getting wonderfully uprooted and they're too strong to get sucked into this 'country' crap.”

— Buckminster Fuller 1895 – 1983 CE

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“Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. 'Patriotism' is its cult... Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.”

— Erich Fromm 1900 – 1980 CE
One of the most powerful voices of his era promoting the true personal freedom beyond social, political, religious, and national belief systems

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“If it’s not a paradox, it’s not the truth.”

— Shunryu Suzuki Roshi 1904 – 1971 CE

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“No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom… From an economic point of view, the central concept of wisdom is permanence. We must study an economics of permanence.”

— E. F. Schumacher 1911 – 1977 CE
The “People's Economist”

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“It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.”

— Arthur C. Clarke 1917 – 2008 CE
from The Exploration of Space

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“Our mind is like a clear glass of water. If we put salt into water, it becomes salt water; sugar, it becomes sugar water, shit, it becomes shit water. But originally the water is clear.”

— Seungsahn 숭산행원대선사 1927 – 2004 CE
(Soen Sa Nim)

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“The Buddhist idea of a politician is not so much one of a con man or of a businessman who wins favor with everybody, but someone who simply does what is necessary… having a sense of responsibility to society.”

— Chögyam Trungpa 1939 – 1987 CE
from A Buddhist Approach to Politics

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“Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do…
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...”

— John Lennon 1940 – 1980 CE

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“Whenever we cling to a particular side of reality, it’s we who are the monkeys, losing ourselves in outrage or partial delight… when the mind is clear, each is an occasion for rejoicing.”

— Stephen Mitchell 1943 CE –
from Second Book of Tao

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