“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.”
The Book of Tea
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Kakuzo Okakura 16
Japanese scholar, author of The Book of Tea 1862–1913Related quotes
“I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.”
Source: Testimony: its Posture in the Scientific World (1859), p. 14
“So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.”
Variant: So many things are possible as long as you don't know they're impossible.
Source: The Phantom Tollbooth
“To accomplish the perfect perfection, a little imperfection helps.”
Imperfection http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21399/Imperfection
From the poems written in English
Address at the Conference on Cosmic Design, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C. (April 1999)
Interview with Joan Gordon
Context: There’s simultaneously something rigorous and something playful in genre. It’s about the positing of something impossible—whether not-yet-possible or never-possible—and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity. It’s carnivalesque in its impossibility and overturning of reality, but it’s rationalist in that it pretends it is real. And it’s that second element which I think those who dip their toes in the SF pond so often forget. They think sf is “about” analogies, and metaphors, and so on. I refute that—I think that those are inevitable components, but it’s the surrendering to the impossible, the weird, that characterizes genre. Those flirting with SF don’t surrender to it; they distance themselves from it, and have a neon sub-text saying, “It’s okay, this isn’t really about spaceships or aliens, it’s about real life,” not understanding that it can be both, and would do the latter better if it was serious about the former.