Zen is poetry; poetry is Zen.

The love of nature is religion, and that religion is poetry; these three things are one thing. This is the unspoken creed of haiku poets.

I myself think that to have a cat is more important than to have a Bible.

Things have done their part; it is for us to do ours.

These are some of the characteristics of the state of mind which the creation and appreciation of haiku demand: Selflessness, Loneliness, Grateful Acceptance, Wordlessness, Non-intellectuality, Contradictoriness, Humor, Freedom, Non-morality, Simplicity, Materiality, Love, and Courage.

Zen is the game of insight, the game of discovering who you are beneath the social masks.

It is not merely the brevity by which the haiku isolates a particular group of phenomena from all the rest; nor its suggestiveness, through which it reveals a whole world of experience. It is not only in its remarkable use of the season word, by which it gives us a feeling of a quarter of the year; nor its faint all-pervading humour. Its peculiar quality is its self-effacing, self-annihilative nature, by which it enables us, more than any other form of literature, to grasp the thing-in-itself.