Top 30 Quotes & Sayings by Okakura Kakuzo

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Japanese author Okakura Kakuzo.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
Okakura Kakuzo

Okakura Kakuzō was a Japanese scholar and art critic who in the era of Meiji- Restoration reform defended traditional forms, customs and beliefs. Outside Japan, he is chiefly renowned for The Book of Tea: A Japanese Harmony of Art, Culture, and the Simple Life (1906). Written in English, and in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War, it decried Western caricaturing of the Japanese, and of Asians more generally, and expressed the fear that Japan gained respect only to the extent that it adopted the barbarities of western militarism.

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.
A garden is a friend you can visit any time.
Tea is a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities. We have good and bad teas, as we have good and bad paintings - generally the latter. — © Okakura Kakuzo
Tea is a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities. We have good and bad teas, as we have good and bad paintings - generally the latter.
The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.
Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilization were to be based on the gruesome glory of war.
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.
Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.
True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally complete the incomplete.
Friends are flowers in life's garden.
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.
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.
The canvas upon which the artist paints is the spectator's mind.
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.
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.
Perfection is everywhere if we only choose to recognise it.
Tea is more than an idealization of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of life.
We take refuge in pride, because we are afraid to tell the truth to ourselves.
Cares melt when you kneel in your garden.
Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage.
In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends.
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 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.
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.
It is not the accumulation of extraneous knowledge, but the realization of the self within, that constitutes true progress. — © Okakura Kakuzo
It is not the accumulation of extraneous knowledge, but the realization of the self within, that constitutes true progress.
Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.
Tea...is a religion of the art of life.
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.
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.
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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