“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.”

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man’s future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual’s total development lags behind?

We recommend for the training of teachers not only a considerable artistic education in general but special attention to the art of reading.

Noble ideas, great sentiments have always existed and have always been transmitted, but wars have never ceased.

The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

The child who concentrates is immensely happy.

The possibility of observing the developments of the psychical life of the child as natural phenomena and experimental reactions transforms the school itself in action into a kind of scientific laboratory for the psychogenetic study of man.

We are not created only to enjoy the world, we are created in order to evolve the cosmos.

The greatest development is achieved during the first years of life, and therefore it is then that the greatest care should be taken. If this is done, then the child does not become a burden; he will reveal himself as the greatest marvel of nature.

The child’s mind is not the type of mind we adults possess. If we call our type of mind the conscious type, that of the child is an unconscious mind. Now an unconscious mind does not mean an inferior mind.

Free the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world.

Travel stories teach geography; insect stories lead the child into natural science; and so on.

There can be no ‘graduated exercises in drawing’ leading up to an artistic creation. That goal can be attained only through the development of mechanical technique and through the freedom of the spirit.

All work is noble; the only ignoble thing is to live without working.

Observation, very general and wide-spread, has shown that small children are endowed with a special psychic nature. This shows us a new way of imparting education!

My system is to be considered a system leading up, in a general way, to education. It can be followed not only in the education of little children from three to six years of age, but can be extended to children up to ten years of age.

The purpose of life is to obey the hidden command which ensures harmony among all and creates an ever better world.

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.