47 Quotes About Tao-te-ching

Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness. All can know good as good only because there is evil.

To know and to think we know not, is the crown. Not to know and to think we know, is the affliction.

The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority.

To think, or not to think...This is the true question.

Heaven and earthbegin in the unnamed:name’s the motherof the ten thousand things.

To bear and not to own; to act and not lay claim; to do the work and let it go: for just letting it go is what makes it stay.

Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore benefit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.

The hard and mighty lie beneath the groundWhile the tender and weak dance on the breeze above.

Those who know don’t talk. Those who talk don’t know. Close your mouth, block off your senses, blunt your sharpness, untie your knots, soften your glare, settle your dust. This is the primal identity. Be like the Tao. It can’t be approached or withdrawn from, benefited or harmed, honored or brought into disgrace. It gives itself up continually. That is why it endures.