There is nothing stronger in the world than gentleness.
Truth, like surgery, may hurt, but it cures.
I had to learn that there is more to the human being than material comfort, more than success, more even than national spirit or patriotism. That in any being worthy of being human there is also a demand for justice, for liberty, and that justice needs the evidence of all our lives, liberty is one and indivisible and collective, and no one can talk of justice solely for expediency's sake, nor of liberty while human beings, anywhere else on earth, are still in bondage.
Love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.
We are all products of our time, vulnerable to history.
People never think about words, they only feel them.
There is nothing in the world stronger than gentleness.
Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.
All humans are frightened of their own solitude. But only in solitude can we learn to know ourselves, learn to handle our own eternal aloneness.
You can only understand the present age when it is past.
Goldfish are flowers ... flowers that move.
People bring to what they see and feel, the inner weather of their souls and complexion of their minds.
It is the illusion of all lovers to think themselves unique and their words immortal.
One should never condemn what one cannot understand.
Sadness is so ungrateful.
Love can never explain the loved one, my dear. It is the essence of wild unreason.
This is Malaya. Everything takes a long, a very long time, in Malaya. Things get done, occasionally, but more often they don't, and the more in a hurry you are, the quicker you break down.
These ways to make people buy were strange and new to us, and many bought for the sheer pleasure at first of holding in the hand and talking of something new. And once this was done, it was like opium, we could no longer do without this new bauble, and thus, though we hated the foreigners and though we knew they were ruining us, we bought their goods. Thus I learned the art of the foreigners, the art of creating in the human heart restlessness, disquiet, hunger for new things, and these new desires became their best helpers.
Moralists have no place in an art gallery.
Persecution matures young rebels.
With some people there is such a thing as the habit of betrayal.
Many events seem to happen twice to me; even trifles, unimportant-seeming, recur, as if I were destined to live them again, time reconquered, but with added knowledge and a different outcome.
No single crisis shapes a generation; but a succession of events, each one bringing its shaping blows to bear.
I really can't hate more than 5 or 10 years. Wouldn't it be terrible to be always burdened with those primary emotions you had at one time?
Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did.
