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Kakuzo Okakura Quotes

Okakura Kakuzō was a Japanese scholar who contributed to the development of arts in Japan. Outside Japan, he is chiefly remembered today as the author of The Book of Tea. Wikipedia  

✵ 26. December 1862 – 2. September 1913
Kakuzo Okakura photo

Works

The Book of Tea
The Book of Tea
Kakuzo Okakura
The Book of Tea
The Book of Tea
Kakuzo Okakura
Kakuzo Okakura: 16 quotes1 like

Famous Kakuzo Okakura Quotes

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

Kakuzo Okakura

“In joy or sadness flowers are our constant friends.”

Kakuzo Okakura

Source: The Book Of Tea

“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.”

Kakuzo Okakura book The Book of Tea

Source: The Book of Tea

“Tea… is a religion of the art of life.”

Kakuzo Okakura book The Book of Tea

Source: The Book of Tea

Kakuzo Okakura Quotes

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

Kakuzo Okakura book The Book of Tea

Source: The Book of Tea

“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.”

Kakuzo Okakura book The Book of Tea

Source: The Book of Tea

“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.”

Kakuzo Okakura book The Book of Tea

Source: The Book of Tea

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

Kakuzo Okakura book The Book of Tea

Source: The Book of Tea

“New York City vagrant:
"What sort of 'nese are you people? Are you Chinese, or Japanese, or Javanese?"

Kakuzo Okakura responds:
"We are Japanese gentleman. But what sort of 'key are you? Are you a Yankee, or a donkey, or a monkey?”

Kakuzo Okakura

“We catch a glimpse of the great river of science which never ceases to flow in India. For India has carried and scattered the data of intellectual progress for the whole world, ever since the pre-Buddhist period when she produced the Sankhya philosophy and the atomic theory.”

Kakuzo Okakura

Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

“Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilisations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal, which is the common thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all the great religions of the world, and distinguishing them from those maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the Particular, and to search out the means, not the end, of life.”

Kakuzo Okakura

The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan, 1903. Okakura, Kakuzō (1903). The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan. London: J. Murray. p. 1.

“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 social order.”

Kakuzo Okakura book The Book of Tea

The Book of Tea. Kakuzo Okakura, in Green Gold: The Empire of Tea (30 November 2011) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=4SCZJFFf6ZsC&pg=PT64, p. 64.

“It (Teaism) is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.”

Kakuzo Okakura book The Book of Tea

The Book of Tea

“Tea is a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities.”

Kakuzo Okakura book The Book of Tea

Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea (1906), Ch. II.

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