Chinese were born, it seemed to me, with an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naivete, and unless they were transplanted too young, these qualities ripened in them. To talk even with a farmer and his family, none of whom could read or write, was often to hear a philosophy at once sane and humorous. 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.

I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected b…

Yet somehow our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is in the w…

We are not empire builders. How important this fact is no American who has not lived in Asia can appreciate. It goes against our conscience, which is a very te…

In teaching me the way to live It taught me how to die.

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

The general notions about human understanding: which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly…