Hu Shih

Philosopher

1891-12-17

Quotes by Hu Shih

• India Conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.

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• On the basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death or decay, but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or worse, lives on in the immortality of The Larger.

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• In the year 1915 a series of trivial incidents led some Chinese students in Cornell University to take up the question of reforming the Chinese language.

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• For all the social changes in China can be traced to their early beginnings in the days when the new tools or vehicles of commerce and locomotion first brought the Chinese people into unavoidable contact with the strange ways and novel goods of the Western peoples.

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• Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.

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• Within my own life, I read all the beloved novels by lamps of vegetable oil; I saw the Standard Oil invading my own village, I saw gas lamps in the Chinese shops in Shanghai; and I saw their elimination by electric lights.

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• The underlying sickness of human life is an unwillingness to look with open eyes at the condition of the world.

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• Whenever you do something without asking yourself, Why am I doing this?-that is meaningless life... . The why of life makes it meaningful... . Only when an answer is given is one living life as a man.

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• The knowledge that mankind needs is not the way or principle which has an absolute existence, but the particular truths for here and now and for particular individuals. Absolute truth is imaginary, abstract, vague, without evidence, and cannot be demonstrated.

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