“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 maternal duty of suckling her own children, prescribed to mothers by hygienists, is based on a physiological principle: the mother’s milk nourishes an infant more perfectly than any other.

The consciousness of knowing how to make oneself useful, how to help mankind in many ways, fills the soul with noble confidence, almost religious dignity.

Early childhood education is the key to the betterment of society.

At three years of age, the child has already laid the foundations of the human personality and needs the special help of education in the school.

When you have solved the problem of controlling the attention of the child, you have solved the entire problem of its education.

Education is a work of self-organization by which man adapts himself to the conditions of life.

We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master.

When the child begins to think and to make use of the written language to express his rudimentary thinking, he is ready for elementary work; and this fitness is a question not of age or other incidental circumstance but of mental maturity.

Now, what really makes a teacher is love for the human child; for it is love that transforms the social duty of the educator into the higher consciousness of a mission.

It is better to treat an adolescent as if he had greater value than he actually shows than as if he had less and let him feel that his merits and self-respect are disregarded.

Once we have lived, the inner spark of vision does the rest.

If the whole of mankind is to be united into one brotherhood, all obstacles must be removed so that men, all over the surface of the globe, should be as children playing in a garden.

The hand is, in the highest degree, a human characteristic. It is man’s organ of grasp and of the sense of touch, while in animals these two functions are relegated to the mouth.

Speech is one of the marvels that characterize man, and also one of the most difficult spontaneous creations that have been accomplished by nature.

To confer the gift of drawing, we must create an eye that sees, a hand that obeys, a soul that feels; and in this task, the whole life must cooperate. In this sense, life itself is the only preparation for drawing.

The study of expression ought to form a part of the study of psychology, but it also comes within the province of anthropology because the habitual, life-long expressions of the face determine the wrinkles of old age, which are distinctly an anthropological characteristic.

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.