Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors. They are the oldest civilized people on earth. T...heir civilization passes through phases but its basic characteristics remain the same. They yield, they bend to the wind, but they never break.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Chinese were born ... with an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naivete, and unless they were transplan...ted too young, these qualities ripened in them.... If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Histories of the world omitted China; if a Chinaman invented compass or movable type or gunpowder we promptly "forgot it" and name...d their European inventors. In short, we regarded China as a sort of different and quite inconsequential planet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the evening we attended a lecture by Rev. Fitch, a missionary for twenty years to China--the husband of our bright cousin, Mary... McClelland.... He spoke of the three hundred millions of people in China. Twelve million a year die in ignorance of the Bible--one million a month perishing without salvation! This to me seems monstrous. God, the Father of all, God, who is love, dooms millions of his creatures to eternal torment! ... He is to bring a new religion to a polite and cultivated people!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... if there's a house, then there is a wall ... between them and the outside world. The ideal is to stay inside and to never have... to go out, and the whole idea of staying home is really important. I think men do get out, but it is not glamorized the way it is here in America, where the big story is to ride out and go someplace and to travel.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I am useless, one more girl who couldn't be sold. When I visit the family now, I wrap my American successes around me like a pr...ivate shawl. I am worthy of eating the food. From afar I can believe my family loves me fundamentally. They only say, "When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls," because that is what one says about daughters. But I watched such words come out of my own mother's and father's mouths; I looked at their ink drawing of poor people snagging their neighbors' flotage with long flood hooks and pushing the girl babies on down the river. And I had to get out of hating range. I read in an anthropology book that Chinese say, "Girls are necessary too"; I have never heard the Chinese I know make this concession. Perhaps it was a saying in another village.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus I believe that without doing violence to the ancient doctrine of the Chinese, one can say that the Li has been brought by the... perfection of its nature to choose, from several possibilities, the most appropriate; and that by this means it has produced the Ki (Ch'i) or matter with dispositions such that all the rest has come about by natural propensities, in the same way that Monsieur Descartes claims to bring forth the present order of the world as a consequence of a small number of initially generated assumptions. Thus the Chinese, far from being blameworthy, merit praise for their ideas of things being created by their natural propensity and by a pre-established harmony.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »