Quotes from Reginald Horace Blyth

Mud is the most poetical thing in the world.

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.

What is Zen? Zen is looking at things with the eye of God, that is, becoming the thing's eyes so that it looks at itself with our eyes.

Think of Zen, of the Void, of Good and Evil and you are bound hand and foot. Think only and entirely and completely of what you are doing at the moment and you are free as a bird.

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.

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.

A haiku is the expression of a temporary enlightenment, in which we see into the life of things.

What is essential is not the answer but the questions; the answers indeed are the death of the life that is in the questions.

There is no greater difference between men than between grateful and ungrateful people.

There is nothing intrinsically more beautiful or poetical about the moon than about a dunghill; if anything, the contrary, for the latter is full of life and warmth and energy.

We that change, hate change. And we that pass, love what abides. Ashes, darkness, dust.

Zen is the unsymbolization of the world.

If all men lead mechanical, unpoetical lives, this is the real nihilism, the real undoing of the world.