“a good amount of first-class Chinese poetry has been translated into English, with much fidelity and spirit, by several distinguished people; Witter Bynner and Lionel Giles come most readily to mind.”

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“a Zen master was once asked what was the most valuable thing in the world and the master answered that a dead cat was, because no one could put a price on it.”

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“all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.”

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“he was either as brief as a gatekeeper at a Trappist monastery—sometimes for days, weeks at a stretch—or he was a non-stop talker.”

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“however presumably lofty the intellectual, moral, and spiritual heights we've all reached, our gusto for the lurid or the partly lurid (which of course, includes both low and superior gossip) is probably the last of our fleshy appetites to be sated or effectively curbed.”

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“I'll champion indiscrimination till doomsday, on the ground that it leads to health and a kind of very real, enviable happiness. Followed purely, it's the way of the Tao, and undoubtedly the highest way.”

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“Isn't the true poet or painter a seer? Isn't he, actually, the only seer we have on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist.”

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“Perhaps Mad Shelley wasn't quite mad enough. Assuredly, in any case, his madness wasn't a madness of the heart.”

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“Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man.”

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“Surely the one and only great poet the psychoanalysts have had was Freud himself; he had a little ear trouble of his own, no doubt, but who in his right mind could deny that an epic poet was at work?”

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“the dangers of prolonged contact with any poetry that seems to exceed what we most familiarly know of the the first-class are formidable... Used with moderation, a first-class verse is an excellent and usually fast-working form of heat therapy.”

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“the fact that the great Kierkegaard was never a Kierkegaardian, let alone an Existentialist, cheers one bush-league intellectual's heart to no end, never fails to reaffirm his faith in a cosmic poetic justice, if not a cosmic Santa Claus.”

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“The miracle of Chinese and Japanese verse is that one pure poet's voice is absolutely the same as another's and at once absolutely distinctive and different.”

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“The true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.”

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“there is very evidently one rather terrible hallmark common to all persons who look for God, and apparently with enormous success, in the queerest imaginable places—e.g.investigating loaded ashtrays with an index finger—he very frequently behaves like a fool, even an imbecile.”

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“we are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it... God undoubtedly loves kittens, but not, in all probability, with Technicolor bootees on their paws.”

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“Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)”

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“Zen is rapidly becoming a rather smutty, cultish word...Pure Zen, need I add—will be here even after snobs like me have departed.”

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