Xu Zhimo Quotes

China, Poet
January 15, 1897 – November, 19, 1931.

Xu Zhimo (January 15, 1897 – November 19, 1931) was an early 20th-century Chinese poet. Xu Zhimo, original name Xu Yousen, pseudonyms Nanhu and Shizhe (b. 1896, Xiashi, Zhejiang province, China—d. Nov. 19, 1931, Jinan, Shandong province), was a free-thinking Chinese poet who strove to loosen Chinese poetry from its traditional forms, and to reshape it under the influences of Western poetry and the vernacular Chinese language.

If the materialistic west is a civilisation without a heart, as we are accustomed to regard it nowadays, ours, on the other hand is one without a soul.

Xu Zhimo
- Heart
- Soul
- Civilisation
Drama as an art is quite unspeakable, although some old plays are admirable as a form of vulgar amusement.

Xu Zhimo

When we come to poetry, we can't fancy a more poverty stricken predicament.

Xu Zhimo
My personal experience has only discovered two classes of people in China; Cynics who despise love and cowards who are afraid of it.

Xu Zhimo
Our sages are preoccupied ... with the not very easy task of equilibrating and harmonising the obvious impulses that men share with their fellow beings, such as food and sex.

Xu Zhimo
- Sex
- Impulses
- Preoccupied
Love, is transcendental and transfiguring, and being transfigured through that mysterious force, one's mortal eyes.

Xu Zhimo
- Love
- Force
- Mortal Eyes
And then there are those ninth grade followers of European methods, who are as puerile in technique as they are void in imagination.

Xu Zhimo
With all our virtues and qualities, we Chinese as a race have never realised and expressed ourselves completely, as the Greek and the Romans did, through the medium of art.

Xu Zhimo
- Art
- Chinese
- Qualities

Music is a paradise lost to us long long ago, perhaps never to be regained.

Xu Zhimo
- Music
- Paradise
- Regained
The search for religion is the starting point of thought.

Xu Zhimo
- Search