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The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto QUOTES

The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto QUOTES

1 " None of the things in life - like love or faith - was arrived at by thinking; indeed, one could almost define the things that mattered as the ones that came as suddenly as thunder. "

― Pico Iyer , The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

2 " If you are not happy, act the happy man. Happiness will come later. If you are in despair, act as though you believe. Faith will come afterwards. "

― Pico Iyer , The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

3 " As I wandered around the room, with Sachiko by my side, I began to think how much we need space in those we love, space enough to accommodate growth and possibility. Knowledge must leave room for mystery; intimacy, taken too far, was the death of imagination. Keeping some little distance from her was, I thought, a way of keeping an open space, a silence for the imagination to fill.
"At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things," Thoreau had written, "we require that all things be mysterious and unexplainable. "

― Pico Iyer , The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

4 " When you're hurrying around too quickly," he had said, "there's a part of the world you can't see. If, for example, you're taking a wrong direction in your life, it's only when you stop and look at things clearly that you can revise your direction and take a more proper course. Then message of Zen is that in order to find ourselves, we've got to learn to stop. "

― Pico Iyer , The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

5 " And just as it is common to hear how, when one is in love, anything one sees reminds one of that love—our feelings remake the world in a secular equivalent of the faith that sees the hand of God in everything—so I began to find that when one is thinking on a theme, everything seems to reflect on it. Suddenly, everything I saw or read, in this girlish city of temples, seemed to take me back to the theme of the lady and the monk. "

― Pico Iyer , The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

6 " The ultimate purpose of Zen," I remembered the röshi telling me, "is not in the going away from the world but in the coming back. Zen is not just a matter of gaining enlightenment; it's a matter of acting in a world of love and compassion. "

― Pico Iyer , The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

7 " To do what I want, and not to do what I won't - this is why I entered such a life. "

― Pico Iyer , The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

8 " both characters had given up what they held dearest, the very basis of their lives — their premises — for a woman, and then had found in her a kind of saving grace. They had opened themselves up and, in the opening, found a transformation. In the pretty pun of C. S. Lewis, they had been “surprised by joy. "

― Pico Iyer , The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto