The dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become merely shows and mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon, and it is mere tinsel. It will not please us as much as when its …
Many go out for wool and return shorn. Cervantes.
What is any man’s discourse to me, if I am not sensible of something in it as steady and cheery as the creak of crickets? Henry David Thoreau.
Whatever is beautiful at all is beautiful in itself. Its beauty ends there, and praise has no part in it. Nothing is the better or the worse for being praised. Thus true beauty needs nothing beyond itself, any more than law, or truth, or kindness, or honor. For none of these gets a single grace …
Length and shortness create each other, from each other. The ideas of height and lowness arise from a contrast between the two. The musical notes of the scale become harmonious melodies and chords through the relation of one with another, and the spaces in between. Anything which is in front of, has something behind it. …
As we were formerly by crimes, so we are now overburdened by law. Montaigne.
In the works of mankind, as in those of nature, it is really the motive which is chiefly worth attention. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Basho was a master of the ninth century. One day he was sitting with his feet across the garden-path. A monk came along with a wheel-barrow. Tuck in your feet, said the monk. What has been extended cannot be retracted, answered Basho. What has been started cannot be stopped cried the monk who then pushed …