Quotes by South Korean Authors - Page 3

The more she laughs, the more he ups the ante with his clowning. By the time he finishes he will have run through all the secret mysteries of laughter that human beings have ever understood, mobilizing everything at his disposal. There is no way for him to know how guilty it makes his mother feel, seeing such a young child go to such lengths just to wring a bit of apparent happiness from her, or that her laughter will all eventually run out.
Han Kang
I once believed man was different from other animals, but Yodok showed me that reality doesn't support this opinion. In the camp, there was no difference between man and beast, except maybe that a very hungry human was capable of stealing food from its little ones while an animal, perhaps, was not.
Kang Chol-Hwan
I hope you remember that if you encounter an obstacle on the road, don’t think of it as an obstacle at all… think of it as a challenge to find a new path on the road less traveled.
Hyeonseo Lee
As these contrasts show, capitalism has undergone enormous changes in the last two and a half centuries. While some of Smith’s basic principles remain valid, they do so only at very general levels.For example, competition among profit-seeking firms may still be the key driving force of capitalism, as in Smith’s scheme. But it is not between small, anonymous firms which, accepting consumer tastes, fight it out by increasing the efficiency in the use of given technology. Today, competition is among huge multinational companies, with the ability not only to influence prices but to redefine technologies in a short span of time (think about the battle between Apple and Samsung) and to manipulate consumer tastes through brand-image building and advertising.
Ha-Joon Chang
If the world were full of the self-seeking individuals found in economics textbooks, it would grind to a halt because we would be spending most of our time cheating, trying to catch the cheaters, and punishing the caught. The world works as it does only because people are not the totally self seeking agents that free-market economics believes them to be. We need to design an economic system that, while acknowledging that people are often selfish, exploits other human motives to the full and gets the best out of people. The likelihood is that, if we assume the worst about people, we will get the worst out of them.
Ha-Joon Chang
It's only natural for people to fall, but there are people who, even if they fall, jump right back up right away and run forward, and there are people who just keep sitting there, crying.
Ilchi Lee
Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe. I will never truly be free of its gravity, no matter how far I journey.
Hyeonseo Lee
He looked so silly that I could not stop laughing, even as my tears kept flowing. Is the root of laughter also sorrow? As I laughed, I was filled with both joy and sorrow.
Kyung-Sook Shin
You can hide things from the world, but you can never hide things from time.
Kim Dong Hwa
_For what ends_ does one claim cosmopolitanism? _Whose interest_ does it serve?
Namsoon Kang
Religion is about hospitality, solidarity, and responsibility or it is nothing at all.
Namsoon Kang
the overall theme of theology can be twofold: the search for meaning and the responsibility one has to the others.
Namsoon Kang
Cosmopolitan discourse emphasizes the _cosmic belonging_ of all individual human beings as the ground of our hospitality, solidarity, justice and neighbor-love. Cosmopolitan discourse is about turning a _compassionate gaze_ onto others regardless of one's nationality and citizenship, origin of birth, religion, gender; race and ethnicity, sexuality, or ability
Namsoon Kang
the cosmopolitan gaze of planetary love and hospitality _is_ what constitutes being _religious_.
Namsoon Kang
One should regard one's religious or denominational affiliation as a point of departure, a point of entry, not the point of arrival because on cannot confine God to a particular religion or faith tradition, and therefore should not claim one's exclusive ownership of God. Regarding one's religious or denominational affiliation as _accidentality_; not as _inevitability_, is important in religious discourse and practice because such a sense of _accidentality_ of one's affiliation allows a space of _alterity_ of reciprocal contestation and challenge, and a space of planetary gaze that sees others as fellow human beings, _regardless_.
Namsoon Kang
Theological discourses function in various ways as sites of contestation and resistance, of forming new religious and personal identities, and of building solidarities. Theological discourses that theologians produce, disseminate, and teach in academia are not simply objective interpretations and neutral reflections on the world and the church in it. Instead theological discourses are productions of and for the world and the church that we live in
Namsoon Kang
Cosmopolitan theology is a theology for _the impossible_.
Namsoon Kang
cosmopolitan theology that longs for the Kindom of God seeks to recover its revolutionary universalizing ethos in terms of hospitality, neighbor-love, and multiple solidarities that one can see in Jesus' teaching and ministry, without any imperialist, kyriarchcal, hierarchical implications
Namsoon Kang
What does it mean to be human, to continue to live as human, to remain _faithful_ to the Divine while living in a cultural, sociogeopoltical, and religious world where power disparity between/among humans based on religious world where power disparity between/among humans based on their nationality, citizenship, gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, religion and so forth still prevails? The act of _theologizing_ for me involves responding to these questions and stimulating the practice of liberating and enlarging human possibility in our daily reality.
Namsoon Kang
I fully recognize there is an urgent need for constructing the _strategic we-nes-in-sameness_ and promoting the _solidarity of sameness_. The sheer realization of the inextricable interconnectedness of I-ness/me-ness and we-ness/us-ness is the round for an authentic solidarity with one another in spite of and regardless of the difference.
Namsoon Kang
Cosmopolitanism emphasizes and is grounded in a _singular relationality between and among people
Namsoon Kang
Cosmopolitanism is a radical affirmation of the idea of neighbor/enemy-love-as-self love...Cosmopolitanism is about a cosmic scope of justice and hospitality––another name for _love_.
Namsoon Kang
Cosmopolitan theology affirms and radicalizes the belief that the Divine creates each and every human being as equal to every one else as a _citizen-of-the-cosmos and that no one is either superior or inferior to the other.
Namsoon Kang
The time and space in which I have been working on this cosmopolitan project have convinced me that the disparity between the ideal of cosmopolitan theology and the current sociopolitical configuration of hospitality, welcoming others, unconditional forgiveness, is itself a _prophetic call_ to which we all have to respond––as humans, as person of faith. The _real_ is always about calculation and conditionality, whereas the _ideal_ of cosmopolitan theology is about incalculability, unconditionality, and planetarity of the _world-as-it-ought-to-be_. Therefore, the disparity between the reality and the ideality is not a space for despair but a space where one's sense of prophetic call_ and passion for _the impossible_ must come in.
Namsoon Kang
I believe theology should be about one's way of life, a kind of gaze into onesself and others, and a mode of one's profound existence in the world.
Namsoon Kang
Cosmopolitan discourse...provides one with a _public gaze_ with which one can relate oneself to others in a different way.
Namsoon Kang
The question is not, therefore, _whether_ a theory is grand or small, or whether it is universal/global or particular/local, but _what function_ a theory plays and _whose interest_ it serves.
Namsoon Kang
I want to affirm that thinking and living, knowing and doing, theory and practice intersect.
Namsoon Kang
Cosmopolitanism has offered me an ethical perspective and a conceptual framework with which to read the _signs of our times_ as a theologian and intellectual who has a public responsibility for constantly offering a way to engage in this rapidly changing public world.
Namsoon Kang
Theological discourse can be, in and of itself, a form of identity and solidarity.
Namsoon Kang
How can one maintain a theological confidence in what one claims to be _true_ while acknowledging the existence of multiple religions that also claim to be _true_?
Namsoon Kang
Cosmopolitanism starts from the _singular_ individual rather than the _faceless_ collective
Namsoon Kang
I believe _cosmopolitanism_ can be an effective discourse with which to advocate a politics of _transidentity_ of overlapping interests and heterogeneous or hybrid subjects in order to challenge conventional notions of exclusive belonging, identity and citizenship.
Namsoon Kang
Religion is about hospitality and responsibility, and about neighbor/enemy-love-as-self-love in a Christian term that requires one to turn a new _gaze_ onto others––what I call a _cosmopolitan gaze_.
Namsoon Kang
The politics of trans-identity seeks to move from the _politics of singular identity_ to the _politics of multiple solidarities_ across various identities without abandoning one's personal attachments and commitments to the group that one finds significant.
Namsoon Kang
Cosmopolitanism promotes a sense of new _we-ness as regarding every individual human being as a citizen of the cosmos. However, the _we-cosmic-citizens_ are not to promote the _we-ness-in-sameness_, but rather the we-ness-in-alterity_.Unlike the solidarity-in-sameness, cosmopolitan _solidarity-in-alterity_ celebrates the singularity and difference of each individual human being while not denying the historical necessity of the strategic construction of _we_ to challenge the very sociopolitically imposed category
Namsoon Kang
Theology should be a discourse that helps the sociopolitical approach to justice to maintain its human face and not to become impersonal.
Namsoon Kang
Regard mistakes as teachers, not judges!
Tae Yun Kim
I would go one step further and say that the willingness to challenge professional economists - and other experts - should be the foundation of democracy. When you think about it, if all we have to do is to listen to the experts, what is the point of having a democracy at all? Unless we want our societies to be run by a body of self-elected experts, we all have to learn economics and challenge professional economists
Ha-Joon Chang
You will not die if you abandon them. You will not lose if you abandon them. You will gain something greater. If you do not abandon them you will never reach enlightenment, nor find your self that is at peace.
Woo Myung
It is the same principle as washing dirty clothes - the more you clean the dirt away, the more it goes back to its original state. A piece of paper, which has been scribbled on, gets cleaner the more the scribbling is erased. Enlightenment is the same as knowing the true state of the paper once it is clean.
Woo Myung
Sacrifice: That's what makes our mosaic so beautiful and rich.
Lee Myung-Bak
Mom's eyes held yours for a moment. 'I don't like or dislike the kitchen. I cooked because I had to. I had to stay in the kitchen so you could all eat and go to school. How could you only do what you like? There are things you have to do whether you like it or not.' Mom's expression asked, What kind of question is that? And then she murmured, 'If you only do what you like, who's going to do what you don't like?
Kyung-Sook Shin
...I have so many dreams of my own, and I remember things from my childhood, from when I was a girl and a young woman, and I haven't forgotten a thing. So why did we think of Mom as a mom from the very beginning? She didn't have the opportunity to pursue her dreams, and all by herself, faced everything the era dealt her, poverty and sadness, and she couldn't do anything about her very bad lot in life other than suffer through it and get beyond it and live her life to the very best of her ability, giving her body and her heart to it completely. Why did I never give a thought to Mom's dreams?
Kyung-Sook Shin
A man who becomes enchanted by the flower's fragrance stays only for a fleeting moment, but a man who comes because of love stays for a lifetime.
Kim Dong Hwa
Only Yeong-hye, docile and naive, had been unable to deflect their father's temper or put up any form of resistance. Instead, she had merely absorbed all her suffering inside her, deep into the marrow of her bones. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, In-hye could see that the role that she had adopted back then of the hard-working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter had been a sign not of maturity but of cowardice. It had been a survival tactic.
Han Kang
The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn't understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.
Han Kang
Even when we have realized oneness and nothingness, we still have our personal lives to manage, bodies to take care of, and mouths to feed, and you will know which one is yours and which ones are others', so you won't put food into another person's mouth when you are hungry. Also you won't kiss a rattlesnake or hug a cactus no matter how strong an affinity you feel toward them. But at the same time, we know these apparent separations are functional, not fundamental, and should be recognized as such without mistaking one for the other. I would call this apparent separation "functional ego," or you can call it your "character," which is the collection of your beliefs, habits, and other people's expectations.
Ilchi Lee
Oh sky...I won't ask so much as to become the sun or the moon, just one of the stars in between...
Lucia Jang
Recognizing Nothing as one's true nature, following the guidance of our conscience - having a clear distinction between absolute and relative values, and using the Earth as the external absolute scale that matches the internal absolute truthfulness.
Ilchi Lee
Behind every person who’s committed an unimaginable crime is an adult who committed unimaginable violence against them as a child. All of them, as if it was plotted that way. Violence begets violence, and that violence begets even more violence.
Gong Jiyoung
Boundaries, rulers, and names of nations can change, but the Earth is always our home and our source of life. Earth is the only indelible identity we can have. This is why I am suggesting that we expand our identities beyond the limits of nationality and culture to encompass the only identity that is definite and real by identifying ourselves, first and foremost, as Earth Citizens.
Ilchi Lee
Overcoming the problems we face today and planting the seed of peace is not a task for any one nation, people, or religion. This will be possible only when spiritually awakened people from every corner of the world share the power of a single vision and create an alliance of Earth-Humans.
Ilchi Lee
Earth is not a private club; it is a universal club. Being born allows you to receive a membership card; you don’t have to do anything else for it. And it is the most beautiful club that you will ever find. Once you have realized that you are a member, don’t you want to keep it clean and comfortable for fellow members to use?” I know I do.
Ilchi Lee
Equality of opportunity is not enough. Unless we create an environment where everyone is guaranteed some minimum capabilities through some guarantee of minimum income, education, and healthcare, we cannot say that we have fair competition. When some people have to run a 100 metre race with sandbags on their legs, the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair. Equality of opportunity is absolutely necessary but not sufficient in building a genuinely fair and efficient society.
Ha-Joon Chang
Being a critic is easy.But if the critic tries to run the operation, he soon understands that nothing is as easy as his criticisms.Criticism without a solution is merely an inflation of the critic's ego.
Haemin Sunim
I know you . . .That you hold insideVast possibilities and dreamsAnd limitless love.
Ilchi Lee
When people who don't know you well admire you, they are seeing their projected illusion, not your real self.In contrast, when people who know you well respect you, it is probably because you deserve it.
Haemin Sunim
Maintain an attitude of anticipating success!
Tae Yun Kim
Realize that "I Can't" usually means "I won't"!
Tae Yun Kim