Eugen Herrigel famous quotes

03-28-2025

The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.
-- Eugen Herrigel

#Thinking #Arrows #Goal
This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.
-- Eugen Herrigel

#Independent #Lightning #Needs
I must only warn you of one thing. You have become a different person in the course of these years. For this is what the art of archery means: a profound and far-reaching contest of the archer with himself. Perhaps you have hardly noticed it yet, but you will feel it very strongly when you meet your friends and acquaintances again in your own country: things will no longer harmonize as before. You will see with other eyes and measure with other measures. It has happened to me too, and it happens to all who are touched by the spirit of this art.
-- Eugen Herrigel

#Country #Art #Archer
The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You do not wait for fulfilment, but brace yourself for failure.
-- Eugen Herrigel

#Letting Go #Failure #Waiting
The more a human being feels himself a self, tries to intensify this self and reach a never-attainable perfection, the more drastically he steps out of the center of being.
-- Eugen Herrigel

#Self #Perfection #Trying
He grows daily more capable of following any inspiration without technical effort, and also of letting inspiration come to him through meticulous observation.
-- Eugen Herrigel

#Inspiration #Effort #Meticulous
Zen Buddhism does not preach. Sermons remain words. It waits until people feel stifled and insecure, driven by a secret longing.
-- Eugen Herrigel

#Buddhism #Insecure #People
The hand that guides the brush has already caught and executed what floated before the mind at the same moment the mind began to form it, and in the end the pupil no longer knows which of the two-mind or hand -was responsible for the work.
-- Eugen Herrigel

#Two #Hands #Mind
By letting go of yourself, leaving yourself and everything yours behind so decisively that nothing more is left of you but a purposeless tension .
-- Eugen Herrigel

#Letting Go #Leaving #Tension
This means that the mind or spirit is present anywhere, because it is nowhere attached to any particular place. And it can remain present because, even when related to this or that object, it does not cling to it by reflection and thus lose its original mobility.
-- Eugen Herrigel

#Mean #Reflection #Mind
In the case of archery, the hitter and the hit are no longer two opposing objects, but are one reality.
-- Eugen Herrigel

#Reality #Archery #Two
The man, the art, the work--it is all one.
-- Eugen Herrigel

#Art #Men #He Man
Assuming that his talent can survive the increasing strain, there is one scarcely avoidable danger that lies ahead of the pupil on his road to mastery.
-- Eugen Herrigel

#Lying #Mastery #Assuming
Far from wishing to awaken the artist in the pupil prematurely, the teacher considers it his first task to make him a skilled artisan with sovereign control of his craft.
-- Eugen Herrigel

#Teacher #Artist #Wish
The shot will go smoothly only when it takes the archer himself by surprise.
-- Eugen Herrigel

#Archer #Crafts #Surprise
Often nothing keeps the pupil on the move but his faith in his teacher, whose mastery is now beginning to dawn on him .... How far the pupil will go is not the concern of the teacher and master. Hardly has he shown him the right way when he must let him go on alone. There is only one thing more he can do to help him endure his loneliness: he turns him away from himself, from the Master, by exhorting him to go further than he himself has done, and to "climb on the shoulders of his teacher."
-- Eugen Herrigel

#Teacher #Loneliness #Moving

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