East Quotes

“Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“We all have that heritage, no matter what old land our fathers left. All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It's a breed - selected out by accident. And so we're overbrave and overfearful - we're kind and cruel as children. We're overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We're oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic - and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture. Can it be that our critics have not the key or the language of our culture?”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!”
― Rudyard Kipling, Kipling: Poems

“The Sage's Wish: Like Sun, from the East, may you continue to rise, smile and shine.”
― Ogwo David Emenike

“كلما ازداد تعدي أوروبا على الشرق في القرن التاسع عشر ازدادت ثقة الجمهور [الغربي] بالإستشراق. لكنه إذا كانت هذه الزيادة في الثقة قد تزامنت مع نقصان الإصالة، فلا ينبغي لنا أن ندهش كثيراً، لأن أسلوب الإستشراق منذ البداية كان يقوم على إعادة البناء والتكرار”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“She would search for him.
In the land that lay east of the sun and west of the moon.
But there was no way there.”
― Edith Pattou, East

“They journeyed far and the white bear said, "Are you afraid?"
"No," she replied. "I am not afraid.”
― Edith Pattou, East

“Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. ”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The Indian may seem poor to we rich Westerners but in matters of the spirit it is we who are the paupers and they who are millionaires.”
― Mark Twain

“Neither Rose nor Charles liked to talk much of their adventures with the trolls, but some of the so-called "softskins" whom they had brought out of Niflheim, as well as the crew of the ship Soren had hired to go north to find Rose, must have spread the story, because for many years afterward, there were tales of a race of trolls living on top of the world.
Only Rose and her white bear know the whole truth of it.”
― Edith Pattou, East

“This is imperative for the East as well as the West. “Come now, let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18).”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“Daisuke was of course equipped with conversation that, even if they went further, would allow him to retreat as if nothing had happened. He had always wondered at the conversations recorded in Western novels, for to him they were too bald, too self indulgent, and moreover, too unsubtly rich. However they read in the original, he thought they reflected a taste that could not be translated into Japanese. Therefore, he had not the slightest intention of using imported phrases to develop his relationship with Michiyo. Between the two of them at least, ordinary words sufficed perfectly well. But the danger was of slipping from point A to point B without realizing it. Daisuke managed to stand his ground only by a hair's breadth. When he left, Michiyo saw him to the entranceway and said, "Do come again, please? It's so lonely.”
― Natsume Sōseki, And Then

“Your enemy is not in the Middle East or Asia, it is your own government.”
― Steven Magee

“When you buy a device from market, you get a booklet with it. Entire western science is a booklet for a device called “human”. They assume that we are human. The East has experienced that “human” is just a device we are currently using. We are much more than a human.”
― Shunya

“Those whose minds were open, curious and generous were based in the east, and certainly not in Europe.”
― Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads Illustrated Ed.

“Some societies, and some people here, too, have decided that if women copy the West and start wearing skirts and jeans, they will find freedom, or if they are allowed to go out of their homes to work they will find freedom, but a woman in jeans can be beaten as much as a woman in a burqa.”
― Imran Omer, Entangled Lives

“Korean woman who had escaped from the North to the South. She was talking about love. ‘If you grow up in the West,’ she said, ‘you may think romance occurs naturally, but it does not. You learn how to be romantic from books and movies, or from observation. But there was no model to learn from in my parents’ time. They didn’t even have the language to talk about their feelings. You just had to guess how your beloved felt from the look in his eyes, or the tone of her voice as she spoke to you.”
― Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch

“The need has to be defined by an Individual. If the basic need of quenching thirst can be met by a glass of water, everything beyond that is indulgence. Ego makes organizations sell products and services that deviate from servicing the needs to making higher profits. The further away you get from fulfilling a need and into making people believe that they need to buy a certain product or services as a necessity, the more tension builds into the system.”
― Ajay Chaturvedi, Lost Wisdom of the Swastika: Turiya Tales

“I always found in myself a dread of the west and a love of the east.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“The East is fascinated with the western standard of living. The West is fascinated with eastern beliefs and practices.”
― Rajesh`, Random Cosmos

“A strikingly large number of our settlements are oriented to the west and, where circumstances permit, relocate in a westward direction. The east stands for lost causes. Especially at the time that the continent of America was being colonized, it was noticeable that the townships spread to the west even was their eastern districts were falling apart.”
― W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

“Hello MERS, goodbye world.”
― Steven Magee

“On closer inspection, however, the event in question turns out to be rather more mysterious, rather more of an unidentified 'historical' object. The thawing out of the countries of the East is without doubt an extraordinary turn of events. But what exactly happens to freedom when it is defrosted? Such an operation must be a hazardous one, its outcome uncertain (quite apart from the fact that you are not supposed to refreeze what you have once defrosted). The USSR and the Eastern bloc constituted not just a deep-freeze for freedom but also a laboratory, an experimental environment in which freedom was isolated and subjected to very high pressures. The West, on the other hand, is merely a museum - or, more accurately, a dump - for freedom and the Rights of Man. If deep-freezing was the distinctive (and negative) mark of the Eastern universe, the ultra-fluidity of our Western universe is even more disreputable, because thanks to the liberation and liberalization of our mores and beliefs, the problem of freedom can simply no longer be posed. Rather, it is virtually resolved. In the West, freedom - the Idea of freedom - has died its fine death; all the recent commemorations have clearly shown that the idea of freedom is gone. In the East it has been murdered - but there is no such thing as the perfect crime.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“The more I see of the West, he says, the more I realize that the best things in life come from the East.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“Moradi hated using the word "West." He preferred just saying the US or if he wanted to bundle the entire Western Hemisphere, then he would go by the book and say the Occident. He also didn't label Iran as a "Middle Eastern" country. He would always say things like "with Iran being in West Asia." It was a tactical move. After all Iranians weren't Arabs, and this way he aligned Iran with the "West.”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, Tajrish

“She had heard that the first dragons came from the east, from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai and the islands of the Jade Sea ... Magic had died in the west when the Doom fell on Valyria and the Lands of the Long Summer, and neither spell-forged steel nor stormsingers nor dragons could hold it back, but Dany had always heard that the east was different.
...
"A trader from Qarth once told me that dragons came from the moon," blonde Doreah said...”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“She had heard that the first dragons had come from the east, from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai and the islands of the Jade Sea ... Magic had died in the west when the Doom fell on Valyria and the Lands of the Long Summer, and neither spell-forged steel nor stormsingers nor dragons could hold it back, but Dany had always heard that the east was different.
...
"A trader from Qarth once told me that dragons came from the moon," blonde Doreah said...”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“One real difference between art and craft: with craft, perfection is possible. In that sense the Western definition of craft closely matches the Eastern definition of art. In Eastern cultures, art that faithfully carries forward the tradition of an elder master is honored; in the West it is put down as derivative.”
― David Bayles and Ted Orland

“У 1787 році, вирушивши з Відня на захід до Праги, Моцарт писав, що перетнув східний кордон. Схід і Захід, Азія і Європа завжди були розділені у свідомості щонайменше так само як і земля — кордонами.”
― Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945