Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.
The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.
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.
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.
It is not the accumulation of extraneous knowledge, but the realization of the self within, that constitutes true progress.
Friends are flowers in life’s garden.
Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage.
Cares melt when you kneel in your garden.
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 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.
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.
True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally complete the incomplete.
The canvas upon which the artist paints is the spectator’s mind.
Tea…is a religion of the art of life.
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.
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.
