Zhuangzi Quotes

“Those who count things are not worthy of assisting the people.”
― Zhuangzi, The Book of Chuang Tzu

“Our habits limit what we can see, access, sense, and know.”
― Michael Puett, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life

“A parallel comparison helps to capture the similarities between existentialism (especially Nietzsche's) and Daoism (especially Zhuangzi's). Both discover the practical pointlessness of universal or absolute meaning (purpose). Nietzsche, from his perspective as a disappointed Christian yearning for absolute, transcendent, dependence on God, experiences this awareness with existentialist angst, a sensation of looking off a cliff into a bottomless abyss. The angst is caused by the vertigo impulse, the fear we will jump or drop off our perch into that nothingness. Zhuangzi, from his Daoist sense of the constraint of conventional authority, does not think of any cliff as a reference point. If the abyss is bottomless, then there is no such thing as falling. The cliff and Zhuangzi are both floating free. Leaving the cliff and entering the abyss is weightlessness―free flight―not falling. From his relativistic perspective, the cliff is floating away. Zhuangzi's reaction is not "Oh no!" but "Whee!”
― Chad Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation

“It is rank, wealth, prominence, prestige, fame, and advantage that arouse the will. It is appearances, actions, sexual beauty, conceptual coherence, emotional energies, and intentions that entangle the mind. It is dislikes, desires, joy, anger, sorrow, and
happiness that tie down Virtuosity. It is avoiding, approaching, taking, giving,
understanding, and ability that block the Course. When these twenty-four items do not disrupt you, the mind is no longer pulled off center. Centered, it finds stillness. Still, it finds clarity. Once clear, it becomes empty, and once empty, it is able to “do nothing, and yet leave nothing undone.”
― Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries

“Daoism also encourages people to love deeply and live compassionately (ci), to exercise restraint and frugality (jian), to seek harmony, and to practice wuwei (action as nonaction). Daoist precepts speak often and strongly against harming any creature, whether by disturbing their homes or eating their bodies. Guanyin, the most popular Chinese deity, exemplifies deep compassion for all beings. The Zhuangzi highlights basic similarities between humans and anymals, and encourages people to treat all beings with care and respect.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Animals and World Religions

“In the end, the best way to approach Chuang Tzu, I believe, is not to attempt to subject this thought to rational and systematic analysis, but to read and reread his words until one has ceased to think of what he is saying and instead has developed an intuitive sense of the mind moving behind the words, and of the world in which it moves.”
― Burton Watson (translator)

“A man in a boat is crossing a river when he sees an empty boat on course to collide with him.

This doesn’t make him angry even though he’s an angry person.

But then he sees someone is in the boat — he calls out, telling them to change direction.

When his first call gets no response, he calls out again.

And when the second is also met with silence, he calls out a third time, throwing in some insults for good measure.

Before, he wasn't angry — now he is.

Before, the other boat was empty — now there's someone in it.

When you imagine the boats empty you won’t be so angry.”
― Zhuangzi

“Zhuangzi might suggest, the true folly is not that they are greedy, but rather that they are not greedy enough. For why limit oneself to a single, fixed identity when one could, instead, embrace the boundless potential of becoming anything? As Zhuangzi puts it: “Without praises, without curses, now a dragon, now a snake, you transform together with the times, and never consent to be one thing alone.”
― Aldrich Chan, 7 Principles of Nature: How We Strayed and How We Return