Yi-Fu Tuan Quotes
1930–2022 China
Yi-Fu Tuan (5 December 1930 – 10 August 2022) was a Chinese-American writer and geographer.
- China
- Academics
- Educators
- Geographers
- Non-fiction authors
Also known as: Tuan, Yi-Fu
Random Yi-Fu Tuan quote
21 quotes
Ideally, society is a dance, and every society has its own choreography that is passed down the generations.
To forgive is to erase a past, depriving it of its power to stain the present.
People who have ‘music’ in their souls are fun to be with.
Experience takes time and calls for patience.
Unlike a small village, the city speaks loud and clear of history, of being the terminus of a long, cumulative process.
Stars define civilization, as no single natural feature on Earth--tree, rock, stream, or mountain--can be said to define cultures.
If each person can achieve greatness, so can each fall into baseness.
Young children distinguish between good people and bad people, but, unless explicitly taught, they do not distinguish between foreigner and native.
Freedom implies space; it means having the power and enough room in which to act.
Children learn early in life that they cannot always count on their parents’ attention much less their smiles, a lesson in human unpredictability that has to be learned over and over again.
Only God creates ex nihilo. Humans can only create out of something that already exists, which means there has to be an earlier destruction phase.
The world feels spacious and friendly when it accommodates our desires, and cramped when it frustrates them.
'Space' is more abstract than 'place'. What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.
At the highest level of achievement, classical music has the feel of an intimate conversation between two individuals and a mass celebration of our common humanity.
We may speak loosely of a ‘sense of time,’ but there is no such sensory organ. Time is something we experience and construct. Time is experienced--is felt--when we wait, expect, or hope.
Words designate, but they also evoke a sense of something, and, when they do, they function as metaphors. ...Metaphors enrich life, making it more vivid.
The ease with which a man can lose his sense of self-worth and fall into the pit of self-abasement is a deeply disturbing psychological fact. Asymmetry of power doesn’t have to be extreme for it to happen. All that is required is for it to seem implacable.
The word routine suggests the humdrum and the inconsequential; however, unlike the routines of workplace and office, those of home are not inconsequential for they're dictated by the cyclical requirements of biological life.
for humans, no matter what the warmth and duration of human contact and what the size of the group, a periodic sense of isolation is inescapable; it is no less than the human condition.
A special target of examination ought to be how societies differ in making room for pauses in the midst of life, for it is during such pauses that individuals are able to appraise the meaning of what they have undergone.