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.

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.

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

It is not the accumulation of extraneous knowledge, but the realization of the self within, that constitutes true progress.

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

In the worship of Bacchus, we have sacrificed too freely.... Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius.

The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism ... for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.