Tao Te Ching
Setting Sun World
Throughout history and continuing until our day, forces for corruption, selfishness, ignorance, and aggression have vied against the influences of wisdom, compassion, and awakened mind. We categorized quotes on these two themes as "Setting Sun" and "Rising Sun."
As the cliché asks, is the glass half empty or half full? Pessimists may be able to more frequently claim being right but optimists may more often claim happier lives. Politicians and religious leaders frequently use pessimism as a way of demoralizing opposition and discouraging challenges to their rule. Scam artists and business advertising frequently use optimism in similar ways. The Setting Sun World approach nourishes pessimism, depression, passivism, and neglect. It disavows any idea of progress and sinks into despair, it deprecates development and disbelieves evolution. Normally, people think of the placebo effect and it’s twin, self-fulfilling prophesy, as a kind of joke, a laughable con that makes us believe fantasies. In the scientific world, however, we see an ever-increasing appreciation and respect for the physical results of our brain activity—the neurotransmitters, endorphins, dopamine, and many still unexplained influences. In the name of “reality,” the Setting Sun world view, only creates more retrogression, suffering, and corruption.
Quotes (129)
“The ignorant and simple-minded burn with the fires of greed, anger and folly. Obsessed with ideas of birth, growth and destruction, they fall into the habit of grasping becoming fixated and attached.”
“The governments of latter-day society have not stored up the necessities of life, they have not diluted the purity of the world, destroyed the simplicity of the world, and made the people confused and hungry... law and justice are at odds”
“Civil strife is as much a greater evil than war as war itself is worse than peace.”
“The sage honors his inborn, basic goodness rising in influence when sanity reigns in society; enduring protected by silence when the Way does not prevail.”
“The rich have become so unsocial, those who own property had rather throw their possessions into the sea than lend aid to the needy, while those who are in power circumstance would less gladly find a treasure than seize the possessions of the rich.”
“When rites and duties become decorations they breed artificial and hypocritical people.”
“When the directives of the leadership are ignored because of factionalism, laws are broken out of treachery, intellectuals busy themselves fabricating clever deceits, mettlesome men occupy themselves fighting, administrators monopolize authority, petty bureaucrats hold power, and cliques curry favor to manipulate the leadership. Then, even though the nation may seem to exist, the ancients would say it has perished.”
“Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.”
“They mistake the pointing finger for the moon. They are idle dreamers lost in form and sensation.”
“I am sick and tired of this life of endless passion, aggression, and ignorance”
“The rich man with no generosity,
Though he has collected wealth through avarice,
At the time of death will be naked and empty-handed.”
“Intellectually brilliant but shallow… they increase the thorns of arbitrary opinion as they show off their ability and understanding… a great pity!”
“Intellectually brilliant but shallow… they increase the thorns of arbitrary opinion as they show off their ability and understanding… a great pity!”
“What else imperils and slays cities, countries, and individuals as much as the amassing of wealth which cannot be gained without harming others?”
“Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground.”
“Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”
“Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?”
“The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.”
“Drinking and gambling are curses that lessen any man’s mind and strength and waste his substance.”
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
“Do you think that men have always massacred each other as they do today? Have they always been liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, grasping and vicious, bloody, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical and stupid?”
“Those who are to be unhappy, think & speak only of the contraries... the Disposition to criticize & be disgusted... it is chiefly an Act of Imagination yet has serious Consequences in Life, as it brings on real Griefs and Misfortunes.”
“The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone cried out and been believed saying, 'Do not listen to this imposter.'”
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
“Christ has brought the kingdom of God nearer to earth; but, he has been misunderstood; and in place of God's kingdom the kingdom of the priest has been established”
“I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and like the grave, cries, 'Give, give.'”
“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”
“The heaviest charge we can bring against the general texture of society is that it is commonplace.”
“We have been ruled more by deceit than by force, and we have been degraded more by vice than by superstition. Ambition and intrigue abuses the credulity and experience of men lacking all political, economic, and civic knowledge”
“The great affliction of all philistines is that they have no interest in ideas and that, to escape being bored, they are in constant need of realities But realities are higher unsatisfactory or dangerous; when they lose their interest they become fatiguing.”
“Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try to win on another's money... card playing is so demoralizing, since the whole opject of it is to employ every kind of trick and machination in order to win what belongs to another.”
“Upon that path where flowers never grew
Others as with steps towards the tomb
And others mournfully within the gloom
Of their own shadow walked, and called it death
Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath.
”
“conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth... Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry... Conservatism tends to universal seeming and treachery, believes in a negative fate; believes the men's temper governs them;”
“But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom”
“Let others complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is paltry; for it lacks passion. Men’s thoughts are thin and flimsy like lace, they are themselves pitiable like the lace-makers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful... Their lusts are dull and sluggish, their passions sleepy.”
“I hate this fast growing tendency to chain men to machines in big factories and deprive them of all joy in their efforts — the plan will lead to cheap men and cheap products.”
“Nobody blamed the credulity and avarice of the people, – the degrading lust of gain, which had swallowed up every nobler quality in the national character… These things were never mentioned.”
“Both [Church and State] have the same principle as their point of departure: that of the natural wickedness of man... Both strive to transform men, the one into a saint, the other into a citizen. But the natural man must die.”
“many of these misdeeds were like the subtle muscular movements which are not taken account of in the consciousness, though they bring about the end that we fix our mind on and desire And it is only what we are vividly conscious of that we can vividly imagine to be seen by omniscience.”
“there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men”
“With a cruel analysis that focused on the parts but overlooked the whole, science and intellectuals have left nothing of all that was sacred of old.”
“There will be contemporary monarchs, reigning over the earth—kings of churlish spirit, violent temper, and ever addicted to falsehood and wickedness... Wealth and piety will decrease until the world will be wholly depraved. Property alone will confer rank; wealth will be the only source of devotion; passion will be the sole bond of union between the sexes; falsehood will be the only means of success in litigation; and women will be objects merely of sensual gratification.”
“There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and negation of Liberalism meet, keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means.”
“The development of journalism made it essential that by far the greater part of what is said or done in the world should be so ephemeral as to take itself away quickly; it could keep for 24 hours but not for a week. If that long, it would prevent people from going on to something else.”
“Greek history is a panorama of war for war's sake... the utter ruin of a civilization which in intellectual respects was perhaps the highest the earth has ever seen. The wars were purely piratical. Pride, gold, women, slaves, excitement, were their only motives.”
“A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.”
“Men measure by false standards: everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself and admires others who attain them, while under-valuing the truly precious things in life.”
“Sacredness of human life! The world has never believed it! It has been with life that we settled our quarrels, won wives, gold and land, defended ideas, imposed religions. We have held that a death toll was a necessary part of every human achievement, whether sport, war or industry. A moment's rage over the horror of it, and we sink into indifference.”
“With all the wealth of the world at hand, there are human beings who hunger, whole nations who suffer cold. The judgment for this condition, for misusing Nature's gifts, is the judgment upon man's failure, man's unsteadiness.”
“A thousand reforms have left the world as corrupt as ever, for each successful reform has founded a new institution, and this institution has bred its new and congenial abuses”
“If we look into the souls and thoughts of men, we shall find that this impressive display of material prosperity is merely the shining garment of a polity blind to things without and things within, and blind to the future.”
“The final reason for Rome's defeat was the failure of mind and spirit to rise to a new and great opportunity. They were split into the sharpest oppositions, extremes, a narrow selfishness that kept men blind when their own self-preservation demanded a world-wide outlook. Material development outstripped human development; the Dark Ages took possession of Europe, classical antiquity ended.”
“What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?”
“99 out of every 100 human beings are desperately at work grubbing, sweating, worrying, thinking, sorrowing, enjoying, without in the least knowing why.”
“Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness.”
“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
“Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, with a fanatical denial of the existence of autonomous partial-systems… This leads to collective delusions, instigations to war and revolution, in a word, to destructive mass psychoses… this narrowness of consciousness is always the shortest way to the insane asylum.”
“It was an entry into the monastery of the world, a submission to the vow to believe only in what was probably, average, commonplace, barren of meaning, to renounce everything strange and significant, and reduce anything extraordinary to the banal... only surfaces that hid nothing, only beginnings without continuations, failures that claimed to be problems, oppressively narrow horizons, and the unending desert of routine.”
“The disastrous feature of our civilization is that it is far more developed materially than spiritually. Its balance is disturbed.”
“Nothing can doom man but the belief in doom, for this prevents the movement of return.”
“And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it's all!”
“Religious sectarianism... turned Western Asia from world leadership to destitution... into the poverty, disease, and stagnation of modern times.”
“There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.”
“Caught in the interval between one moral code and the next, an unmoored generation surrenders itself to luxury, corruption, and a restless disorder of family and morals."”
“Barbarism is always around civilization, amidst it and beneath it, ready to engulf it by arms, or mass migrations, or unchecked fertility. Barbarism is like the jungle; it never admits its defeat”
“The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.”
“Why is this century worse than those others?
Maybe, because, in sadness and alarm,
It only touched the blackest of the ulcers,
But couldn't heal it in its span of time.”
“[We are] victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.”
“[Recipe for a setting-sun world]: Take one sexually inept wage-slave, one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television-addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice.”
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
“When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.”
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
“Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty; more loathsome still is the fact that they breed idiocy... mere discipline usurping the place of clear thinking ... Fighting these sad monotonies is one of the duties of a writer.”
“Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.”
“Look at the world today… What madness there is! What blindness! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity crashing headlong against each other. The time must come, my friend, when brutality and the lust for power must perish by its own sword. For when that day comes, the world must begin to look for a new life. And it is our hope that they may find it here.”
“Theologians and philosophers have been saying for a century that God is dead, but what we confront is the possibility that man is dead, transformed into a thing, a producer, a consumer, an idolator”
“Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.”
“I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars,
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
”
“All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”
“In the biblical tradition we have inherited, life is corrupt, and every natural impulse is sinful unless it has been circumcised… The idea of the Fall is that nature is corrupt, sex in itself is corrupt, and the female as the epitome of sex is a corrupter.”
“Once men succeeded in collecting large numbers of slaves, the foundations for the tyranny of the state were laid. Nor is there the slightest doubt that a ruler's desire to own a whole people like slaves or animals grows stronger as their numbers increase.”
“Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by 'a world of enemies,' 'one against all,' that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.”
“See the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest.”
“…the present consumer society is like a drug addict who, no matter how miserable he may feel, finds it extremely difficult to get off the hook.”
“The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase in needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war.”
“Because they use modern machinery, pesticides, and airplanes; what they practice may appear to be modern agriculture, but it is in fact extremely crude, primitive agriculture. On top of it all, they rely almost entirely on monoculture.”
“The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.”
“There was never a moralist at any time who was not certain that things were going from bad to worse.”
“The normal state of consciousness in our culture is both the context and the breeding ground of mental disease.”
“A social norm may come to impose an oppressive obligation on everyone, although few people feel it as their own... Everyone will be carrying out orders—always from elsewhere... This human scene is a scene of mirages, demonic psuedo-realities, because everyone believes everyone else believes them. How can we find our way back to ourselves again?”
“Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.”
“that cold but somehow enthusiastic look, as if he believed in nothing and yet somehow had absolute faith. They’re not idealists; they’re cynics with utter faith. It’s a sort of brain defect, like a lobotomy—that maiming those German psychiatrists do as a poor substitute for psychotherapy.”
“In the absence of the sacred, nothing is sacred - everything is for sale.”
“Our world is now marred by many prison-cultures with the machinery of thought control… distracted by trivia, a perpetual round of entertainments… Big Brother does not watch us by his choice. We watch him by ours.”
“What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.”
“Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters worry less about the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship. What is and what is not show business becomes harder and harder to see… ‘There’s No Business But Show Business.’”
“We worry about robots and AI becoming human while the real concern is people becoming robotic.”
“The illusion of comfort - belief that kicking back, relaxing without challenge will somehow make us happy. Actually, the very opposite is true for both individuals and countries.”
“this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.”
“They have no religious center, they have no philosophical center, and so they act, they do what's expedient at the moment. They have no long view of society. They only have the view of quick money, and kill the pain of the moment, and so instead of dealing with the real problems that exist, that are complicated, they sweep them under the rug by turning on the television set, or taking cocaine, or doing many things that enable them to escape confrontation with the unpleasant realities of the world.”
“The great setting sun of the West has provided us with beautiful, comfortable conditions for living our life, like central heating, air-conditioning, taxicabs, and numerous other conveniences. But that setting-sun approach has provided us purely with a comfortable way to die.”
“Fundamentally we have no idea what we are doing or what we are experiencing, and we are completely missing the point all the time.”
“I would like you to think twice about what you see as your role in this country. It doesn't matter so much about your own particular development. But you should pay some kind of attention to a society which is slowly decaying and full of maggots and worms. We don't want to sit here idle discussing subtleties of philosophy only pleasing ourselves while the rest of the people are suffering immensely... spiritually they are suffering, economically, politically people are suffering.”
“The great setting sun of the West has provided us with beautiful, comfortable conditions for living our life, like central heating, air-conditioning, taxicabs, and numerous other conveniences. But that setting-sun approach has provided us purely with a comfortable way to die.”
“People talking without speaking, people hearing without listening, people writing songs that voices never share and no one dare, disturb the sound of silence”
“The highways of American cities are an enduring testimony to our acceptance of ugliness”
“Chinese leaders used 5 strategies to win over ‘barbarians’ into the ‘true civilization:’ luxurious clothes to corrupt their eyes, delicious food to corrupt their mouths, beautiful women and music to corrupt their ears; massive buildings, slaves, and granaries to corrupt their appetites; and finally, wine and feasts to corrupt the minds of their leaders.”
“In the people who run such businesses we find only hypocrisy, profiteering, and disinformation… a perfect example of institutionalized selfishness.”
“In Western secular societies such a craving for fame and the approval of posterity has largely replaced the afterlife as the way to fill up our lack.”
“Most people in the world don't really use their brains to think. And people who don't think are the ones who don't listen to others.”
“Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.”
“I consider tribalism the biggest problem of our time… it could undo millennia of movement toward global integration… just when technology has brought the prospect of a cohesive planetary community within reach.”
“The typical American child now spends about twenty-one hours a week watching television—roughly one and a half months of TV every year....Outside of school, the typical American child spends more time watching television than doing any other activity except sleeping. During the course of a year, he or she watches more than thirty thousand TV commercials.”
“Mall-hopping corporate concubine... debt-hounded wage slave... Bible-slinging porch monkey... depression-haunted can stacker... mid-American knickknack queen... Winnebago jockey... economic roadkill... 400-pound Tab-drinkers”
“What people do isn't determined by where they live. It happens to be their own damned fault. They decided to watch TV instead of thinking when they were in high school. They decided to blow-off courses and drink beer instead of reading and trying to learn something. They decided to chicken out and be intolerant bastards instead of being open-minded and, finally, they decided to go along with their buddies and do things that were terribly wrong when there was no reason they had to.”
“The most emotionally corrosive form of regret occurs when we fail to take action on something that matters deeply to us.”
“Those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.”
“… from such an array of vultures, from feudal lords to slave traders to oligarchs to neocons to predators like you. All of you strangle your consciences, and ethically you strike yourselves dumb.”
“However, only too frequently, suffering fails to alchemize into ideas, and instead of affording us a better sense of reality pushes us into a baneful direction... by engaging a variety of defense mechanisms which entail arrogance and delusion, cruelty and callousness, spite and rage.”
“What matters is abuse, and how it is anchored in a religion that denies women their rights as humans. What matters is that atrocities against women and children are carried out in Europe. What matters is that governments and societies must stop hiding behind a hollow pretense of tolerance so that they can recognize and deal with the problem.”
“In an individual, selfishness uglifies the world; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.”
“The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and that the masses give free rein to their cravings and passions—and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do.”
“We have taken over by force, inflicting terrible pain and damage on everything and everyone in our way. The number of animals we have killed for our own comfort, pleasure, or entertainment is inconceivable...”
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