“Personal health is related to self-control and to the worship of life in all its natural beauty – self-control bringing with it happiness, renewed youth, and long life.”

The ancient superficial idea of the uniform and progressive growth of the human personality has remained unaltered, and the erroneous belief has persisted that it is the duty of the adult to fashion the child according to the pattern required by society.

If education is protection to life, you will realize that it is necessary that education accompany life during its whole course.

If the ways of the Almighty are not humanly logical, it is not the fault of the Almighty but of the limitations of human logic.

The person who is developing freely and naturally arrives at a spiritual equilibrium in which he is master of his actions, just as one who has acquired physical poise can move freely.

The chief symptom of adolescence is a state of expectation, a tendency towards creative work, and a need for the strengthening of self-confidence.

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

In the first three years of life, the foundations of physical and also of psychic health are laid. In these years, the child not only increases in size but passes through great transformations.

To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator.

The development of language is part of the development of the personality, for words are the natural means of expressing thoughts and establishing understanding between people.

The adolescent must never be treated as a child, for that is a stage of life that he has surpassed.

It is fortunate, I think, that nature is not bounded by human reason and by laboratory work and experimentation, for by the laws of pure reason and by microscopic investigation, it might easily have been proved, long before this, that children could not be born.

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.

If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.

No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was.

This is the age in which language and movement develop. The child must be safeguarded in order that these activities may develop freely.

The ability to see reality in form, in color, in proportion, to be master of the movements of one’s own hand – that is what is necessary.

I’m related to people I don’t relate to.

I started examining history and then everything related to the theater. History, art, all the other studies, if I could link them into the theater, then it became alive for me. It just opened up my eyes.

Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times-the pulse of today.

You know about the fantasies related to the classics, but there is no real discussion about today’s life and no discussion of the real conditions – which is really sickening.

[Shanghai Biennale] has been my attitude for as long as I’ve been practicing art and other cultural-related activities.

But personally, I don’t think my work and my understanding of art is so much related to being Chinese, but the character of that. Maybe it’s beyond my own consciousness.

I don’t personally feel any association with a kind of culture related to state, or culture related to power, which I think is always disgusting.