15 Quotes by Cao Xueqin

似蹙非蹙笼烟眉，似喜非喜含情目。闲静如桥花照水，行动似弱柳扶风。

To each his fate in love, I suppose.

莫失莫忘，仙寿恒昌。不离不弃，芳龄永继。

A place remote, where footsteps seldom pass,And dew glistens on the untrodden grass.

No remedy but love Can make the lovesick well; Only the hand that tied the knot Can loose the tiger’s bell.

When grief for fiction’s idle words More real than human life appears, Reflect that life itself’s a dream And do not mock the reader’s tears.

Having made an utter failure of my life, I found myself one day in the midst of my poverty and wretchedness, thinking about the female companions of my youth. As I went over them one by one, examining them and comparing them in my mind’s eye, it suddenly came over me that those slips of girls – which is all they were then – were in every way, both morally and intellectually, superior to the ‘grave and mustachioed signior’ I am now supposed to have become.

My only wish is that men in the world below may sometimes pick up this tale when they are recovering from sleep or drunkenness, or when they wish to escape from business worries or a fit of the dumps, and in doing so find not only mental refreshment but even perhaps, if they will heed its lesson and abandon their vain and frivolous pursuits, some small arrest in the deterioration of their vital forces.

To hold the garden’s fragrance in one vase, And see all autumn in a single spray?