Okakura Kakuzo Quotes
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Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage.
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The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.
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True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally complete the incomplete.
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In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends.
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The canvas upon which the artist paints is the spectator's mind.
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In the worship of Bacchus, we have sacrificed too freely.... Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius.
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Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.
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It is not the accumulation of extraneous knowledge, but the realization of the self within, that constitutes true progress.
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Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.
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We take refuge in pride, because we are afraid to tell the truth to ourselves.
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A garden is a friend you can visit any time.
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Tea with us became more than an idealisation of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of life. The beverage grew to be an excuse for the worship of purity and refinement, a sacred function at which the host and guest joined to produce for that occasion the utmost beatitude of the mundane.
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The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing. What a tempest in a tea-cup! he will say. But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup.
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Perfection is everywhere if we only choose to recognise it.
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Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observes, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade- all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of colour or design.
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For life is an expression, our unconscious actions the constant betrayal of our innermost thought. Perhaps we reveal ourselves too much in small things because we have so little of the great to conceal. The tiny incidents of daily rouitine are as much a commentary of racial ideas as the highest flight of philosophy or poetry.
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Tea...is a religion of the art of life.
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Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilization were to be based on the gruesome glory of war.
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Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.
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In our common parlance we speak of the man "with no tea" in him, when he is insusceptible to the serio-comic interests of the personal drama.
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Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.
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Friends are flowers in life's garden.
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In Japan, I took part in a tea ceremony. You go into a small room, tea is served, and that's it really, except that everything is done with so much ritual and ceremony that a banal daily event is transformed into a moment of communion with the universe.
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The ancient sages never put their teachings in a systematic form. They spoke in paradoxes, for they were afraid of uttering half-truths. They began by talking like fools and ended by making their hearers wise.