Reason must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he has himself formulated.
The superior man will watch over himself when he is alone. He examines his heart that there may be nothing wrong there, and that he may have no cause of dissatisfaction with himself.
He was the meekest of his sex, the mildest of little men. He sidled in and out of a room, to take up the less space. He walked as softly as the Ghost in Hamlet, and more slowly. He carried his head on one side, partly in modest depreciation of himself, partly in modest propitiation of everybody else.
Those who have succeeded in attaching or detaching their minds at will have succeeded in Pratyahara, which means gathering towards, checking the outgoing powers of the mind, freeing it from the thralldom of the senses. When we can do this, we shall really possess character; then alone we shall have taken a long step towards freedom. Before that, we are mere machines.
There's a victory and defeat-the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats-which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.
The Bad Lands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth.
The more especially, as in my juvenile frankness, I took some credit to myself for being so confidential and felt that I was quite the patron of my two respectful entertainers.
I wanted to try to create characters that happen to be Asian but who are pretty different from those we generally see in our culture, in our commercial culture.
Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is the character of all life and being.
There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball where everyone hides his real character, then reveals it by hiding
Of course, people will call you an old artist or young artist, which is just a character of you. But personally, I don't think my work and my understanding of art is so much related to being Chinese, but the character of that. Maybe it's beyond my own consciousness.