Reginald Horace Blyth famous quotes

03-30-2025

Thus we see that the all important thing is not killing or giving life, drinking or not drinking, living in the town or the country, being unlucky or lucky, winning or losing. It is how we win, how we lose, how we live or die, finally, how we choose....
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Country #Drinking #Winning
Or, to express this in another way, suggested to me by Professor Suzuki, in connection with seeing into our own nature, poetry is the something that we see, but the seeing and the something are one; without the seeing there is no something, no something, no seeing. There is neither discovery nor creation: only the perfect, indivisible experience.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Discovery #Perfect #Vision
We walk, and our religion is shown even to the dullest and most insensitive person in how we walk. Or to put it more accurately, living in this world means choosing, choosing to walk, and the way we choose to walk is infallibly and perfectly expressed in the walk itself. Nothing can disguise it. The walk of an ordinary man and of an enlightened man are as different as that of a snake and a giraffe.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Mean #Men #Snakes
Regarding R. H. Blyth: Blyth's four volume Haiku became especially popular at this time [1950's] because his translations were based on the assumption that the haiku was the poetic expression of Zen. Not surprisingly, his books attracted the attention of the Beat school, most notably writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, all of whom had a prior interest in Zen.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Book #School #Expression
Regarding R. H. Blyth: For translations, the best books are still those by R. H. Blyth. . . .
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Book #Stills #Translations
Regarding R. H. Blyth: The first book in English based on the saijiki is R. H. Blyth's Haiku, published in four volumes from 1949 to 1952. After the first, background volume, the remaining three consist of a collection of Japanese haiku with translations, all organized by season, and within the seasons by traditional categories and about three hundred seasonal topics.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Book #Three #Four
Regarding R. H. Blyth: Blyth is sometimes perilous, naturally, since he's a high-handed old poem himself, but he's also sublime - and who goes to poetry for safety anyway.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Safety #Poetry #Sublime
Nothing divides one so much as thought.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth
Zen is the unsymbolization of the world.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#World
What is essential is not the answer but the questions; the answers indeed are the death of the life that is in the questions.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Essentials #Answers
Zen is the game of insight, the game of discovering who you are beneath the social masks.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Games #Mask #Social
The object of our lives is to look at, listen to, touch, taste things. Without them, - these sticks, stones, feathers, shells, - there is no Deity.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Shells #Stones #Taste
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.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Self #Years #Giving
There is a Hindu myth about the Self or God of the universe who sees life as (play). But since the Self is what there is and all there is and thus has no one separate to play with, he plays the cosmic game of hide-and-seek with himself... all the time forgetting who he really is. Eventually however the Self awakens from his many dreams and fantasies and remembers his true identity, the one eternal Self of the Cosmos who is never born and never dies.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Dream #Self Esteem #Games
There is no greater difference between men than between grateful and ungrateful people.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Ungrateful People #Men #Garden
I myself think that to have a cat is more important than to have a Bible.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Cat #Thinking #Important
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.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Appreciation #Loneliness #Grateful
Mud is the most poetical thing in the world.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Mud #World #Earth
A haiku is the expression of a temporary enlightenment, in which we see into the life of things.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Life #Expression #Enlightenment
The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink, night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things. . . . When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living. To do this twenty-four hours a day is the Way of Haiku. It is having life more abundantly.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Life #Fall #Night
If all men lead mechanical, unpoetical lives, this is the real nihilism, the real undoing of the world.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Life #Real #Men
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.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Love #Three #Poet
Zen is mind-less activity, that is, Mind-ful activity, and it may often be advisable to emphasize the mind, and say, Take care of the thoughts and the actions will take care of themselves.
-- Reginald Horace Blyth

#Mind #Care #May

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