We must accept our existence in as wide a sense as can be; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible within it.
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Book
Letters to a Young Poet
The original 1906 edition of The Book of Tea is one of the classic texts found on the desks of artists, poets, teaists and Zen Buddhists around the world. The book has been re-designed and expanded for a contemporary audience. You will
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...writing is difficult...
We are solitary.
...what we call fate originates in ourselves in humankind, and does not work on us from the outside.
...there are many indications that it is the future that enters into us like this, in order to be transformed within us, long before it actually occurs. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and static moment when our futur…
...perhaps we should then bear our sadness with greater assurance than our joys. For they are the moments when something new enters into us, something unknown to us...
This step forward (at first right against the will of the men who are left behind) will transform the experiences of love, which is now full of error, alter it root and branch, reshape it into a relation between two human beings and no longer between man and woman. And this more human form of love (…
...one day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer just signify the opposite of the male but something in their own right, something which does not make one think of any supplement or limit but only of life and existence: the female human being.
Women, in whom life abides and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully and more trustingly, are bound to have ripened more thoroughly, become more human human beings, than a man, who is all too light and has not been pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of a bodily fruit and who, i…
To love is also good, for love is hard. Love between one person and another: that is perhaps the hardest thing it is laid on us to do, the utmost, the ultimate trial and test, the work for which all other work is just preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, do not…
People have tended (with the help of conventions) to resolve everything in the direction of easiness, of the light, and on the lightest side of the light, but it is clear that we must hold to the heavy, the difficult.
...He perhaps requires of you precisely this existential anxiety in order to begin. Precisely these days of transition are perhaps the period when everything in you is working on him, just as before, as a child you worked on him with bated breath. Be patient and even-tempered and remember that the l…
Don't you see how everything that happens is always a beginning again, and could be it not be His beginning, given that beginnings are in themselves always so beautiful?
...then ask yourself...whether you have really lost God?...and if you feel with horror that even now he is not present, at the moment when we are talking about him, what then gives you the right to miss him who never was, as if he had disappeared, and to search for him as if he were lost?
What goes on in your innermost being is worth all your love, this is what you must work on however you can and not waste too much time and too much energy on clarifying your attitude to other people.
Think...of the world that you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you like. Whether it is memory of your own childhood or longing for your own future - just be attentive towards what rises up inside you, and place it above everything that you notice round about.
There is only one solitude, and that is vast and not easy to bear and almost everyone has moments when they would happily exchange it for some form of company...
But your solitude, even in the midst of quite foreign circumstances, will be a hold and a home for you, and leading from it you will find all the paths you need.
It is good that for the moment you are going into a profession which will make you independent and mean you only have yourself to rely on, in every sense. Have the patience to wait and see whether your inmost life feels confined by the form of this occupation. I consider it a very difficult and a ve…
...love your solitude and bear the pain it causes you with melody wrought with lament. For the people who are close to you, you tell me, are far away, and that shows that you are beginning to create a wider space around you...take pleasure in your growth, which no one can accompany you, and be kind-…