"Can you gather your vital breath and..." - Quote by Lao Tzu

“In stillness the muddied water returns to clarity.”

“Only I am clumsy, like drifting on the waves of the sea, without direction.”

“To realize that you do not understand is a virtue; Not to realize that you do not understand is a defect.”

“An attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life.”

“The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves”

“[On her 101-year-old sister and herself, at 103:] We have a lot to do ... People don't understand this. They think we're sitting around in rocking chairs, which isn't at all true. Why, we don't even own a rocking chair.”

“The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal.”

“Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature! — ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent. Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in Nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is — nor what faith or art or health really is.”

“True beauty consists of purity of heart.”