From R.H. Blyth: “…what Roshi is urging us to lose is such things as self-respect, our immortal souls, our wish to live, our pleasure in life, and so on. Of course, we shall get them all back again, but changed out of all recognition.”
Author Archives: Kevin Warstadt
Quote of the day 05/15/25
From Roshi: “He who studies gains something every day: he who follows the Way loses something every day.”
Quote of the day 05/14/25
From Patmore: To have nought Is to have all things without care or thought
Quote of the day 05/13/25
From Kikaku: The beggar! He has heaven and earth For his summer clothes.
Quote of the day 05/12/25
From R.H. Blyth: “What then is the function of poverty in life, reality, poetry? Poverty means the closest possible approximation of these three things which in our ordinary manner of living are separated.”
Quote of the day 05/11/25
From R.H. Blyth: “Poetry is not iambic tetrameter or what not; it is reality conveyed to us in words, or rather through words, no, in spite of words, and when ‘we see into the life of things,’ we know that our life is reality, our life is poetry, and that these three are and alwaysContinue reading “Quote of the day 05/11/25”
Quote of the day 05/10/25
From Ryokan: You say my poems are poetry? They are not. Yet if you understand they are not,- Then you see the poetry of them!
Quote of the day 05/09/25
From R.H. Blyth: “Roshi, speaking of the man who follows the Way, says, ‘He is like a child alone, careless, unattached, devoid of ambition.’”
Quote of the day 05/08/25
From R.H. Blyth: “Dying for money-it is done every day; but to die from a kind of horror at the abundance of good things, what is the meaning of it? It lies, I think, in the fact that poverty means closeness to nature.”
Quote of the day 05/07/25
From Mencius: “The great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.”
kevinwarstadt.com 