Without going out of your door, You can know the ways of the world. Without peeping through your window, you can see the Way of Heaven. The farther you go, The less you know. Thus, the Sage knows without travelling, Sees without looking, And achieves without Ado. 

To realize that our knowledge is ignorance, This is a noble insight. To regard our ignorance as knowledge, This is mental sickness. Only when we are sick of the sickness Shall we cease to be sick. The Sage is not sick, being sick of sickness; This is the secret of health. -ch. 71, Tao Teh Ching, trans. John C. H. Wu, Shambhala, Boston & London, c.1990

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. 

From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Speak what you think today in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series, Self-Reliance, The Modern Library, Random House, c.1968

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), the famous Japanese Ukiyo-e Print artist said, "From the ago of five I have had passion for sketching the form of things, from about the age of fifty I showed a number of drawings, yet of all I drew prior to my seventies there is truly nothing of any great note. When I was seventy-two I finally made out something of the shape of grasses and trees, the structure of birds and other animals, insects, fishes. Therefore when I become eighty I shall have made more progress; in my nineties I shall have penetrated even further the hidden meaning of things; at the age of a hundred I shall have reached the divine mystery, and at one hundred and ten even dots and lines will surely possess a life of their own. I only beg those of you who will live long enough to verify the truth of my words."

It is not your part to finish the task, yet you are not free to desist from it.

The smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen.