Yuan Mei Quotes

There is a difference between dining and eating. Dining is an art. When you eat to get most out of your meal, to please the palate, just as well as to satiate the appetite, that,my friend, is dining.

(3) a hasty temper, which can be provoked by insults; [Tu Mu tells us that Yao Hsing, when opposed in 357 A.D. by Huang Mei, Teng Ch’iang and others shut himself up behind his walls and refused to fight. Teng Ch’iang said: “Our adversary is of a choleric temper and easily provoked; let us make constant sallies and break down his walls, then he will grow angry and come out. Once we can bring his force to battle, it is doomed to be our prey.” This plan was acted upon, Yao Hsiang came out to fight, was lured as far as San-yuan by the enemy’s pretended flight, and finally attacked and slain.]

A month alone behind closed doors forgotten books, remembered, clear again. Poems come, like water to the pool Welling, up and out, from perfect silence

To learn to be without desire you must desire that. Better to do as you please: sing idleness. Floating clouds, and water idly running -- Where's their source? In all the vastness of the sea and sky, you'll never find it.

Yuan Mei, one of China’s great gourmets, once asked his cook why, since he was so gifted and could produce great delicacies from even the most common ingredients, he chose to stay in their relatively modest household. The cook said, “To find an employer who appreciates one is not easy. But to find one who understands anything about cookery is harder still. So much imagination and hard thinking go into the making of every dish that one may well say I serve up along with it my whole mind and heart.” —LIANG WEI, The Last Chinese Chef

I didn’t know how to read. Mother was my library. I read mother One day The world will be at peace Man will be able to fly Wheat will sprout in the snow Money will have no purpose (…) But in the meantime Mother says We have to work a lot. (Lu Yuan, Fairy Tales) A

If it weren't for this new law forbidding bigamy," Zhao Yuan had mused aloud, "I would have made you my second wife, Mei.

If I had one wish in life,” said Mei Yuan, “it would be that I could spend the rest of it doing nothing else all day but reading.

Though their salaries are above average even in Shanghai—which had China’s third-highest annual urban disposable income per person in 2012 at 40,000 yuan—the cost of appearing successful is stratospheric. A fancy flat and a cool car are well beyond their reach. They are wage slaves who cannot hope to be gao fu shuai—tall, rich and handsome—and marry a woman who is bai fu mei—fair-skinned, rich and beautiful.