Okakura Kakuzo Quotes

The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.

Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.

It is not the accumulation of extraneous knowledge, but the realization of the self within, that constitutes true progress.

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.

A garden is a friend you can visit any time.

Tea is more than an idealization of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of life.

Perfection is everywhere if we only choose to recognise it.

We take refuge in pride, because we are afraid to tell the truth to ourselves.

Friends are flowers in life's garden.

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.

In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends.

Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.

Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order.

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.

True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally complete the incomplete.

Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage.

Cares melt when you kneel in your garden.

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.

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.

The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism ... for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.

The canvas upon which the artist paints is the spectator's mind.

Tea...is a religion of the art of life.

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.

The art of today is that which really belongs to us: it is our own reflection. In condemning it we but condemn ourselves.

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.