When the critical intellect looks at anything carefully, it vanishes. [...] The reason is, of course, that ''things'' exist only relatively - for a point of view or for convenience of description. Thus when we inspect any unit more closely we find that its structure is more complex and more differentiated than we had supposed. Its variety comes to impress us more than its unity. This is why there is something of the spirit of debunking in all scholarship and scientific inquiry.

Associations which form themselves in poetic imagination are, after all, associations which exist in nature, though not along the lines of connection which factual language ordinarily describes.

In Chinese thought the essential goodness of nature and human nature is precisely their good-and-bad. The two do not cancel each other out so as to make action futile: they play eternally in a certain order, and wisdom consists in the discernment of this order and acting in harmony with it.

The sage no more seeks to obliterate the negative - darkness, death, etc. - than to get rid of autumn and winter from the cycle of the seasons.

There emerges, then, a view of life which sees its worth and point not as a struggle for constant ascent but as a dance. Virtue and harmony consist, not in accentuating the positive, but in maintaining a dynamic balance.

Eyes and light arise mutually in the same way as yin and yang. The universe is not, therefore, composed of independent things, that is: as human thought ordinarily fragments it: but the universe disposes itself as things. It is one body, one field, whose parts give rise to each other as inseparably as fronts and backs, but in an endlessly complex and interconnected maze.

This, then, is the paradox that the greater our ethical idealism, the darker is the shadow that we cast, and that ethical monotheism became, in attitude if not in theory, the world's most startling dualism.

In the long run, hell and heaven are both seen to be traps, and final liberation comes with realizing that there is nothing to choose between them.

Life is not a matter of life or death; it is a matter of life and death, and ultimately there is nothing to be dreaded. There is nothing outside the universe, against which it can crash.