Traditional Chinese Quotes & Sayings

(1) Risk-taking behavior, essential for efforts at innovation, is more widespread in some societies than in others. (2) The scientific outlook is a unique feature of post-Renaissance European society that has contributed heavily to its modern technological preeminence. (3) Tolerance of diverse views and of heretics fosters innovation, whereas a strongly traditional outlook (as in China's emphasis on ancient Chinese classics) stifles it. (4) Religions vary greatly in their relation to technological innovation: some branches of Judaism and Christianity are claimed to be especially compatible with it, while some branches of Islam, Hinduism, and Brahmanism may be especially incompatible with it. — Jared Diamond

A club hurts the flesh, but evil words hurt the bone. -Traditional Chinese Proverb — Matthew Polly

In traditional Asian arts, the word and the picture always sit next to each other. I have an aunt, a Chinese brush painter, who told me that when you do a Chinese brush painting, you have to pair the image up with some poetry. — Gene Luen Yang

But Solomon frowned when he saw the Chinese workers in their traditional pointed hats. 'Since they arrived in this area many colobus monkeys have been trapped. The Chinese are buying the skins,' he told us furiously, then with his voice cracking, 'and there was even an elephant killed, the tusks were gone, and it is the first time I see an elephant killed in this area.' Somebody else in the car pointed out that the Chinese had required 14,000 work permits, when as many unemployed Kenyans could have done the work. — Juliet Barnes

I spent some time at a university for traditional Chinese medicine. There's a resurgence of people eating according to traditional Chinese medicine. So our challenge is, How do you marry traditional Chinese medicine with PepsiCo's products? — Indra Nooyi

Technology is the new religion of urban China, and no longer just in the coastal cities. Having wasted decades, centuries almost, overcoming traditional objections to progress, and then wasted thirty years convulsing to a Maoist revolutionary tune, the Chinese have finally gotten themselves into a position where they can develop technology and begin to take on the world. Everywhere you see signs that say REVIVE THE NATION THROUGH SCIENCE AND EDUCATION. — Rob Gifford

Many of those in the medical fraternity instantly label treatments in the traditional, natural or holistic health fields as quackery. This word is even used to describe Traditional Chinese Medicine and the Indian Ayerveda, two medical systems which are far older than Western medicine and globally just as popular. — James Morcan

In Taiwan during the 1960s and mainland China in the 1980s, conceptualism played a role similar to that of Dada, that is, as a vehicle for upsetting conventions - aesthetic, social, and political. Almost all Chinese conceptual artists proclaimed an allegiance to Dada. On the mainland, they also embraced traditional Chan Budhism, wich encourages an ironic sensibility and rejects the privileging of any one doctrine in the search for enlightment. Combined, Dada and Chan Budhism became a potent weapon in the Chinese avant-garde's assault on business as usual. — Gao Minglu

My children were educated in what were then Chinese schools, and they learned English as a subject. But they made up when they went to English-language universities. So they didn't lose out. They had a basic set of traditional Confucian values. Not my grandchildren. — Lee Kuan Yew

Being from a very traditional Chinese-American family, my parents believed the only options to have a successful life were to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer or a business person. — Phillip Lim

Although the rule of law has been codified in the Chinese constitution, a Confucian DNA is pervasively rooted in traditional mindsets as a superior system. — Patrick Mendis

We recognize the distinctness of Asian art when we turn to its traditional forms, recognize it as Japanese, Chinese and Indian, even Balinese or Thai. — F. Sionil Jose

On Christmas, my family and I see a movie and go out for Chinese food. We don't celebrate Christmas in the traditional sense, in that we do not actually celebrate Christmas. — Eden Sher

I would not call my family 'traditional Chinese.' We were more what I would term the Colonial Chinese. — Kevin Kwan

President Obama is in China now for an economic summit in Beijing. The president wore a traditional purple silk shirt along with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. That's after they taught Putin how to put a shirt ON. — Jimmy Fallon

Parenting is the hardest thing I have ever done. I tried to find the balance between the strict, traditional Chinese way I was raised, which I think can be too harsh, and what I see as a tendency in the West to be too permissive and indulgent. If I could do it all again, I would, with some adjustments. — Amy Chua

Had my father loved my mother? He never spoke of her. I always imagined a traditional marriage between them--one built with the strong bones of respect, but stripped of the soft skin of love. — Kay Honeyman

With a far-future setting merging Chinese and American culture, 'Firefly' also saw high-tech futurism blended with the traditional Wild West. — Jay Kristoff

According to a Confucian view, there are four steps in social develpment, wrote Wilhem (Sr.). There are the individual, the family, the state, and mankind. The West had always emphasized the individual and the state. Individual development is extolled, and the single human being is regarded as central and as an atom of society. Over-emphasis on the function of the individual has led to deterioration of the family. Unlike Westerners, the Chinese have given greater weight to family and mankind. The consciousness of the individual is contained in the family, and since traditional China considered itself the world, Chinese considered themselves responsible for humankind rather than for the state. — Hellmut Wilhelm

Tradition, thought Merkin, was not the most reliable thing in the world. Tradition had this nasty habit of asserting itself overnight. A new species of funny-shaped, bioluminescent invertebrate found sixteen thousand feet under the ocean might instantly become part of the Chinese traditional medicine, for instance. You never knew. — Sorin Suciu

Chen pointed to the cub. "There's your brute." Then he pointed to the pups. "And there's your domestication. For the most part, Westerners are descendants of barbarian, nomadic tribes such as the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxons. They burst out of the primeval forest like wild animals after a couple of thousand years of Greek and Roman civilization, and sacked ancient Rome. They eat steak, cheese, and butter with knives and forks, which is how they've retained more primitive wildness than the traditional farming races. Over the past hundred years, domesticated China has been bullied by the brutish West. It's not surprising that for thousands of years the Chinese colossus has been spectacularly pummeled by tiny nomadic peoples. — Jiang Rong

During the Cultural Revolution, the communists came in, and what they wanted to do was eradicate all sense of traditional Chinese culture. — Gene Luen Yang

I'm no ethnomusicologist. There is a connection between the five-note scale used both in traditional Chinese music and the blues, but I don't really understand it. All I know is, whenever I play with Chinese musicians, we seem to belong to the same musical gene pool. — Abigail Washburn

Many Chinese-born scientists have returned from abroad to continue their research, not just out of patriotism but because Chinese research facilities have become so cutting-edge. The Communist revolution's annihilation of traditional thinking has also made for an astonishingly free approach to areas such as medical research; scientists can try things that are banned in the West by strict ethics laws. (I would not be surprised if the first cloned human being is already lurking somewhere along the banks of the Yangtze River.) — Rob Gifford

Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top; Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace. For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances. — John Berger

I can go to my premiere at the Chinese Theatre, and everyone will know me, and everyone will cater to me. And then I'll go to an audition and get rejected left, right and centre. They don't watch my videos, and they don't really know who I am. It is like starting from scratch when it comes to traditional Hollywood. — Lilly Singh

It's not that I wanted to be an actor; it's that I didn't want to be a dancer! I was trained in traditional Chinese dance, and after working so hard it seemed unfair to just disappear into a group. — Ziyi Zhang

One aspect of traditional medicine related to a spiritual cosmology - whether this tradition was Greek, Chinese, or Arab - is the belief that too much food harms the spiritual heart and, in fact, could kill it. It was commonly believed that people who eat in abundance become hardhearted. — Hamza Yusuf

According to tradition, the originator of Taoism, Lao-tzu, was an older contemporary of Kung Fu-tzu, or Confucius, who died in 479 B.C.1 Lao-tzu is said to have been the author of the Tao Te Ching, a short book of aphorisms, setting forth the principles of the Tao and its power or virtue (Te e). But traditional Chinese philosophy ascribes both Taoism and Confucianism to a still earlier source, to a work which lies at the very foundation of Chinese thought and culture, dating anywhere from 3000 to 1200 B.C. This is the I Ching, or Book of Changes. — Alan W. Watts

The traditional Chinese kingdoms operated under centuries of constraints on commerce. The building of walls on their borders had been a way of limiting such trade and literally keeping the wealth of the nation intact and inside the walls. For such administrators, giving up trade goods was the same as paying tribute to their neighbors, and they sought to avoid it as much as they could. The Mongols directly attacked the Chinese cultural prejudice that ranked merchants as merely a step above robbers by officially elevating their status ahead of all religions and professions, second only to government officials. In a further degradation of Confucian scholars, the Mongols reduced them from the highest level of traditional Chinese society to the ninth level, just below prostitutes but above beggars. — Jack Weatherford