#tao

When the great Tao is forgotten, goodness and piety appear. When the body's intelligence declines, cleverness and knowledge step forth. When there is no peace in the family, filial piety begins. When the country falls into chaos, patriotism is born. ↗

— Lao Tzu

#family

It is too facile to say that the way to follow Tao is to simply go along with the flow of life. Sometimes, like the carp, we must know when to go it alone. ↗

— Deng Ming-Dao

#go-with-the-flow #taoism #life

Life is serious...but you cannot take it seriously. ↗

— Peter Butterworth

#life

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. ↗

— Alan Wilson Watts

#tao #nature

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun. ↗

— Alan Wilson Watts

#metaphysics #philosophy #religion #tao #taoism

We are born from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awakening ↗

— Zhuangzi

#existentialism #life #tao #taoism #death

Those who don't know how to suffer are the worst off. There are times when the only correct thing we can do is to bear out troubles until a better day. ↗

— Deng Ming-Dao

#suffering #taoism #harmony

Grappling with fate is like meeting an expert wrestler: to escape, you have to accept the fall when you are thrown. The only thing that counts is whether you get back up. ↗

— Deng Ming-Dao

#fate #perseverance #taoism #wrestling #harmony

The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or…ideologies…all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they posses. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#tao #nature

Countless words count less than the silent balance between yin and yang ↗

— Lao Tzu

#classics #tao-te-ching #balance