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.

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.

Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilization were to be based on the gruesome glory of war.

Friends are flowers in life's garden.

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.

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.

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