Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.

— Zhuangzi

Forget about life, forget about worrying right and wrong. Plunge into the unknown and the endless and find your place there!

— Zhuangzi

Forget the years, forget distinctions. Leap into the boundless and make it your home!

— Zhuangzi

Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.

— Zhuangzi

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

— Zhuangzi

He who has mastered the true nature of life does not labor over what life cannot do. He who has mastered the true nature of fate does not labor over what knowledge cannot change.

— Zhuangzi

He who knows he is a fool is not the biggest fool; he who knows he is confused is not in the worst confusion. The man in the worst confusion will end his life without ever getting straightened out; the biggest fool will end his life without ever seeing the light. If three men are traveling along and one is confused, they will still get where they are going - because confusion is in the minority. But if two of them are confused, then they can walk until they are exhausted and never get anywhere - because confusion is in the majority.

— Zhuangzi

Huangdi's wife died. When Hook went to convey his condolences, he found Huangdi sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub and singing. "You lived with her, she brought up your children and grew old," said Hook. "It should be enough simply not to weep at her death. But pounding on a tub and singing - this is going too far, isn't it?" Zhuangzi said, "You're wrong. When she first died, do you think I didn't grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place, and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there's been another change and she's dead. It's just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter." Now she's going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don't understand anything about fate. So I stopped.

— Zhuangzi

I cannot tell if what the world considers ‘happiness’ is happiness or not. All I know is that when I consider the way they go about attaining it, I see them carried away headlong, grim and obsessed, in the general onrush of the human herd, unable to stop themselves or to change their direction. All the while they claim to be just on the point of attaining happiness.

— Zhuangzi

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

— Zhuangzi