"I am not one who was born..." - Quote by Confucius

“The superior man has a dignified ease without pride. The mean man has pride without a dignified ease.”

“The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.”

“Only one who bursts with enthusiasm do I instruct; Only one who bubbles with excitement do I enlighten. If I hold up one corner and you do not come back to me with the other three, I do not continue the lesson.”

“Read not the Times, read the Eternities.”

“If you demand my authorities for this and that, I must reply that only those who have never hunted up the authorities as I have believe that there is any authority who is not contradicted flatly by some other authority.”

“A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!”

“Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing-that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.”

“If you could avoid all your mistakes, you'd miss everything you learned from them.”

“There's a lot of crap out there. Most of the science fiction films alone are abominations, you know. They're mindless. So you can't learn from those kinds of films.”