Sage Quotes - page 7
The institutions of the Ruler are rooted in his own character and conduct, and sufficient attestation of them is given by the masses of the people. He examines them by comparison with those of the three kings, and finds them without mistake. He sets them up before Heaven and Earth, and finds nothing in them contrary to their mode of operation. He presents himself with them before spiritual beings, and no doubts about them arise. He is prepared to wait for the rise of a sage a hundred ages after, and has no misgivings. His presenting himself with his institutions before spiritual beings, without any doubts arising about them, shows that he knows Heaven. His being prepared, without any misgivings, to wait for the rise of a sage a hundred ages after, shows that he knows men.
Confucius
Korean schoolchildren in North and South learn that Japan invaded their fiercely patriotic country in 1905, spent forty years trying to destroy its language and culture, and withdrew without having made any significant headway. This version of history is just as uncritically accepted by most foreigners who write about Korea. Yet the truth is more complex. For much of the country's long history its northern border was fluid and the national identities of literate Koreans and Chinese mutually indistinguishable. Believing their civilization to have been founded by a Chinese sage in China's image, educated Koreans subscribed to a Confucian worldview that posited their country in a position of permanent subservience to the Middle Kingdom. Even when Korea isolated itself from the mainland in the seventeenth century, it did so in the conviction that it was guarding Chinese tradition better than the Chinese themselves. For all their xenophobia, the Koreans were no nationalists.
Brian Reynolds Myers
We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls. We know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even frybread. We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.
Tommy Orange
He [Válmíki] was the son of Varuna, the regent of the waters, one of whose names is Prachetas. According to the Adhyátmá Rámáyana, the sage, although a Bráhman by birth, associated with foresters and robbers. Attacking on one occasion the seven Rishis, they expostulated with him successfully, and taught him the mantra of Ráma reversed, or Mará, Mará, in the inaudible repetition of which he remained immovable for thousands of years, so that when the sages returned to the same spot they found him still there, converted into a valmik or ant-hill, by the nests of the termites, whence his name of Válmíki.
Valmiki
Ratnakar, the bandit, became the poet Valmiki. Once when he tried to rob a sage, of his meagre belongings, he was told that no one else but he would suffer the consequences of his misdeeds. Repentant and reformed, he asked the sage for the way out of sin. He was told to recite Mara, mar (reverse of Rama). The bandit sat in penance and recited the mantra and forgot the world. An anthill enveloped him. When he was dug out, he was a realised soul and called Valmiki (one who came out of Valmike - Sanskrit for anthill). The urge to write Ramayana was triggered by Valmiki's sensitive reaction to the wailing of a bird, whose mate was killed by a hunter. The ideal society portrayed so realistically in the Ramayana by Valmiki made Gandhiji name the Utopia he envisaged for India: Rama Rajya!
Valmiki
What a monument of human smallness is this idea of the philosopher king. What a contrast between it and the simplicity of humaneness of Socrates, who warned the statesmen against the danger of being dazzled by his own power, excellence, and wisdom, and who tried to teach him what matters most - that we are all frail human beings. What a decline from this world of irony and reason and truthfulness down to Plato's kingdom of the sage whose magical powers raise him high above ordinary men; although not quite high enough to forgo the use of lies, or to neglect the sorry trade of every shaman - the selling of spells, of breeding spells, in exchange for power over his fellow-men.
Karl Popper
