Letters from a Chinese Official: Being an Eastern View of Western CivilizationDoubleday, Page, 1918 - 75 sivua |
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Suositut otteet
Sivu 39 - ... man, is to us in itself a sufficient end. A rose in a moonlit garden, the shadow of trees on the turf, almond bloom, scent of pine, the wine-cup and the guitar; these and the pathos of life and death, the long embrace, the hand stretched out in vain, the moment that glides...
Sivu 26 - Your swarming slums, your liquor-saloons, your poor-houses, your prisons — these, it is true, are melancholy facts. But the evils of which they are symptoms you are setting yourselves to cure, and your efforts, I do not doubt, may be attended with a large measure of success. It is rather the goal to which you seem to be moving when you have done the best you can that I would choose to consider in this place. Your typical product, your average man, the man you call respectable, him it is that I...
Sivu 63 - They are well-behaved, law-abiding, intelligent, economical, and industrious, — they can learn anything and do anything, — they are punctiliously polite, they worship talent, and they believe in right so firmly that they scorn to think it requires to be supported or enforced by might...
Sivu 22 - Nature has her way, covering the highest crags with a mantle of azure and gold and rose, gardenia, clematis, azalea, growing luxuriantly wild. How often here have I sat for hours in a silence so intense that, as one of our poets has said, "you may hear the shadows of the trees rustling on the ground...
Sivu 6 - ... the nations of Europe. But not only is our civilization stable, it also embodies, as we think, a moral order ; while in yours we detect only an economic chaos. Whether your religion be better than ours, I do not at present dispute ; but it is certain that it has less influence on your society. You profess Christianity, but your civilization has never been Christian ; whereas ours is Confucian through and through. But to say that it is Confucian, is to say that it is moral ; or, at least (for...
Sivu 63 - well-behaved, law-abiding, intelligent, economical, and industrious ; they can learn anything and do anything ; they are punctiliously polite, they worship talent, and they believe in right so firmly that they scorn to think it requires to be supported or enforced by might ; they delight in literature, and everywhere they have their literary clubs and coteries for...
Sivu 39 - ... all these things we are trained to respond, and the response is what we call literature. This we have ; this you cannot give us ; but this you may so easily take away. Amid the roar of looms it cannot be heard ; it cannot be seen in the smoke of factories : it is killed by the wear and the whirl of Western life. And when I look at your business men, the men whom you most admire ; when I see them hour after hour, day after day, year after year, toiling in the mill of their forced and undelighted...
Sivu 52 - Humanity, they are taught, is a Being spiritual and eternal, manifesting itself in time in the series of generations. This Being is the mediator between heaven and earth, between the ultimate ideal and the existing fact. By labor, incessant and devout, to raise earth to heaven, to realize, in fact, the good that as yet exists only in idea — that is the end and purpose of human life; and in fulfilling it we achieve and maintain our unity each with every other, and all with the Divine.
Sivu 29 - Your pictures are stories in paint, transcripts of all that is banal, clumsily botched by amateurs as devoid of tradition as of genius. Your outer sense as well as your inner is dead; you are blind and deaf. Ratiocination has taken the place of perception; and your whole life is an infinite syllogism from premises you have not examined to conclusions you have not anticipated or willed. Everywhere means, nowhere an end ! Society a huge engine, and that engine itself out of gear! Such is the picture...
Sivu 68 - To this condition, in earlier days, your countrymen consented to conform, and for many years, in spite of occasional disputes, there was no serious trouble between them and us. The trouble arose over a matter in regard to which you yourselves have hardly ventured to defend your own conduct. A considerable part of your trade was the trade in opium. The use of this drug, we observed, was destroying the health and the morals of our people, and we therefore prohibited the trade. Your merchants, however,...