ŷ������

“It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.”
― Deng Xiaoping

“All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout-nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be controlled and initiated by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I'll remain a member of the loyal opposition.”
― Mo Yan

“An enormous semiofficial drug-smuggling operation was established in order to improve Britain's unfavorable balance of payments with China—the direct result of the British love of tea.”
― Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses

“On the seventh day of the Seventh-month, in the Palace of Long Life,
We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight world
That we wished to fly in heaven, two birds with the wings of one,
And to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree."
Earth endures, heaven endures; some time both shall end,
While this unending sorrow goes on and on for ever.”
― Bai Juyi

“قال محمد بن زكرياء الرازي: قصدني رجل من الصين فأقام بحضرتي نحو سنة تعلم فيها العربية كلاما و خطا في مدة خمسة أشهر، حتى صار فصيحا حاذقا سريع اليد. فلما أراد الانصراف إلى بلده قال لي قبل ذلك بشهر انى عازم على الخروج فأحب ان يمل على كتاب جالينوس الستة عشر لأكتبها، فقلت لقد ضاق عليك الوقت ولا يفي زمان مقامك لنسخ قليل منها فقال الفتى: أسئلك ان تهب لي نفسك مدة مقامي وتمل على بأسرع ما يمكنك فإني أسبقك في الكتابة، فتقدمت إلى بعض تلاميذي بالاجتماع معنا على ذلك فكنا نمل عليه بأسرع ما يمكنا فكان يسبقنا فلم نصدقه إلا في وقت المعارضة فإنه عارض بجميع ما كتبه. وسألته عن ذلك فقال: ان لنا كتابة يعرف بالمجموع وهو الذي رأيتم، إذا أردنا ان نكتب الشئ الكثير في المدة اليسيرة كتبناه بهذا الخط ثم إن شئنا نقلناه إلى القلم المتعارف والمبسوط. وزعم أن الانسان الذكي السريع الاخذ والتلقين لا يمكنه ان يتعلم ذلك في أقل من عشرين سنة. وللصين مداد يركبونه من أخلاط يشبه الدهن الصيني، رأيت منه شيئا على مثال الألواح مختوما عليه صورة الملك، تكفى القطعة، الزمان الطويل مع مداومة الكتابة.”
― ابن النديم, الف��رست

“An inch of gold can't buy an inch of time”
― Nicole Mones, Night in Shanghai

“... it is shameful that there are so few women in science... In China there are many, many women in physics. There is a misconception in America that women scientists are all dowdy spinsters. This is the fault of men. In Chinese society, a woman is valued for what she is, and men encourage her to accomplishments yet she remains eternally feminine.”
― Chien-Shiung Wu

“In February 1912, ancient China came to an end when the last of three millennia of Chinese emperors abdicated.

Imagine twentieth-century Italy coming to terms with the fall of the Roman empire or Egypt with the last pharaoh abdicating in 1912. For China, the last century has been a period of transition - dramatic change and perpetual revolution.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History

“But china is seldom thrown from a great height; it is one of the rarest of human actions. You have to find in conjunction a very high house, and a woman of such reckless impulse and passionate prejudice that she flings her jar or pot straight from the window without thought of who is below.”
― Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting

“Even the hooligan was probably invented in China centuries before we thought of him.”
― Saki

“The Sun Tzu School Ping-fa Directive.
Be strong and continually aware. Manage your strength and that of others. When essential, engage on your terms. Be observant, adaptive, and subtle. Do not lose control. Act decisively. Conclude quickly. Don't Fight!”
― David G. Jones

“Legend has it that while drinking wine in a boat on the river, [8th century Chinese poet Li Po] tried to grab the moon's reflection on the surface and tumbled in, which is probably the poet's equivalent of dying bravely in battle.”
― Matthew White, Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History

“She was like him, trying to embrace the moon while making her way in the world through instinct and drive that came only from within, because she had only herself.”
― Victor Robert Lee, Performance Anomalies

“Mientras contemplaba al presidente tendido en el sarcófago de cristal, recordé la sensación de cataclismo que había tenido dos años antes al oír la noticia de su fallecimiento; el desengaño al descubrir que en el mundo no había dioses. Ni en sueños habríamos creído que el presidente Mao moriría un día, pero murió. Creíamos que si se moría el presidente Mao, sería el fin de China. Pero llevaba dos años muerto, y el país no sólo no había llegado a su fin, sino que iba mejorando paulatinamente [...]”
― Mo Yan, Change

“I have taken a different approach. One that I hope is more easily accessible to the reader’s emotional imagination, though less analytically systematic. I have summoned back into life again—through my own translations from a selection of popular Chinese novel sand poems—some of the imagined worlds in which Chinese have passed their daily reality during the last two hundred years. I have tried to convey something of what it felt like to be a Chinese, living in Chinese society, in different settings of status, age, and gender, and how this has changed over time. For reasons of method, I have looked at a small number of organically coherent emotional spaces, contained in individual works or parts of works, and considered them in detail. ... It would be pretending to more wisdom than I have to claim that the selection I have made is the result of a rigorous intellectual winnowing process from a harvest of widespread reading in late-imperial and modern Chinese literature. Honesty compels the admission that it is more the outcome of chance, serendipity, and whatever happened to catch my imagination, for reasons that I am probably in no position to do more than guess at. ... In so far as there has been a guiding principle behind my choices it has been the desire to show as much as the constraints of space allow of the contrasts among those in different social position, different periods, and different ideologies.”
― Mark Elvin, Changing Stories in the Chinese World

“China is a political beast, with the Party at its heart, and the importance of political and regulatory due diligence cannot be overstated.”
― Jeremy Gordon, Risky Business In China. A Guide To Due Diligence

“Honor the old but allow for innovation.”
― Beau Sides, Lessons from China: A Westerner's Cultural Education

“There were endless stories locked into the silent, cool mass of the Wall, so many memories of stories of so long ago, now only to be imagined. What an incredible feat of human imagination and engineering. A real tribute to visionary and tenacious (if tyrannical) leaders who held a nation together with a common goal, from dynasty to dynasty over the many centuries.”
― Braam Malherbe, The Great Run: Conquering the Sleeping Dragon Within: Life's Lessons on the Run

“Perhaps the most overpowering contrast [with the West] is the virtual absence in premodern China of the idea of a transcendent creator God who is distinct from Nature in a fundamental qualitative sense. The Chinese had notions of a supreme god in various guises (that is, ‘hypatotheism��), and also, as we have seen, of a somewhat demiurge-like ‘transformer�� constantly reshaping the cosmos.”
― Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China

“A very focused Chinese government, with firm, long-term social and economic goals, and an increasingly assertive international voice, is feeling more pressure from the Chinese dreamers, and is putting more pressure on foreign business interests. The foreign multinationals have their purposes, but also feed resentment that so much of China’s hard work results in easy profits for foreign brands and foreign shareholders. This new reality requires foreign firms to pay much more attention to the social context, and to ensure that they can manage the increased political and regulatory risk.

From "Risky Business in China" (Palgrave, September 2014)”
― Jeremy Gordon

“The faces of the people were wrinkled with change. Sudden change to which the skin can't possibly conform, faster than the aging of man, faster, even, than their wildest dreams. It stretched their skin thin, as did their bulging bellies, their newfound love of doughnuts, hamburgers, milk and cheese. What was once a once-a-year privilege could now be bought in twelve shops on the same street.”
― Megan Rich, Six Years of A Floating Life

“They then interviewed us, asking about our love of Qingdao, how we met, why we came. Having learned quickly what they wanted to hear, we answered with the obligatory enthusiasm. Patrick, in especially fine form, waxed the kind of cheesy poetic that put yen-signs in the eyes of the producers. On a seaside boardwalk, for example, they asked him a simple question about the appeal of Qingdao to which he replied with a philosophical metaphor on what he lovingly dubbed, “The Qingdao Mist,�� a euphemism for the constant polluted haze that enveloped the city. He compared it to the dreamlike state of early love, when all landscapes are a pleasant blur of fuzzy details. I, trying not to laugh, vented my amusement in a wide, photographic smile.”
― Megan Rich

“In his lifetime, that small fishing village had turned into the seventh largest port in the world, an eight-million-strong city; women had gotten the right to divorce, of which his wife took full advantage; and his son's living standard was so much higher than his, his so much higher than his own parents, that he couldn't understand the boy's constant desire for more, more, more. Despite a total lack of education from the state, Lao Song, unlike some of his classmates, was not entirely stunted; instead, he sought out the rebellious track of “growing his own mind,�� as he called it, teaching himself whatever he could through rudimentary means. Despite being in China's “Lost Generation,�� Song had somehow found himself.”
― Megan Rich, Six Years of A Floating Life