“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.”

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.

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Kakuzo Okakura 16
Japanese scholar, author of The Book of Tea 1862–1913

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