Daily Inspiration Quote by Hu Shih

Hu Shih is doing something slyly radical here: he’s stripping “the sacred” of its aura of inevitability and rebranding it as a local custom with good PR. The sentence is built on a pair of clean reversals sacred/ridiculous, despised/cornerstone that work like a philosophical trapdoor. If you nod along to the first contrast (sure, other peoples’ taboos can look odd), the second forces you to swallow the harder point: the things you dismiss may be the raw material of someone else’s highest achievements.

The intent is not relativism for its own sake, but a plea for intellectual humility at a moment when China was fighting over how to modernize. Hu Shih, a leading voice of the New Culture Movement, argued for pragmatic reform, vernacular language, and a willingness to interrogate tradition rather than worship it. This line carries that agenda without preaching it: instead of attacking any one doctrine, he discredits the idea that any doctrine is self-evidently permanent.

The subtext cuts both ways. It punctures chauvinism (your “civilized” values aren’t universal), but it also warns reformers against scorched-earth iconoclasm: what looks like cultural junk can become structural, even beautiful, when re-sited and reinterpreted. “Strange grandeur and beauty” is the tell - he’s not promising comfortable harmony. He’s suggesting that cross-cultural translation produces hybrids that may unsettle purists, yet still deserve admiration. In an era addicted to civilizational ranking, Hu offers a more dangerous metric: contingency.