Blyth Quotes & Sayings

...belief that a painting is a window onto another world requires a leap of faith, a willingness to be won over by what lies within the frame. — Sarah Ganz Blyth

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

After the war in Afghanistan, Anna [Wintour, editor of Vogue], deciding to save the world one hair-roller at a time, thought the best way to help the women in this beleaguered country was to start a small beauty school in Kabul, where aid workers could get their roots done. Vanity Fair, edited by Bush-basher Graydon Carter, cheered her great humanitarian effort. — Myrna Blyth

Mr Blyth, you should remember one thing. A celibate island life fighting Turks is no particular guarantee of early maturity. Take a little crone-like advice, and don't rush your judgements. — Dorothy Dunnett

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. — Reginald Horace Blyth

Nothing divides one so much as thought. — R.H. Blyth

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. — R.H. Blyth

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

Regarding R. H. Blyth: Two men who may be called pillars of the Western haiku movement, Harold G. Henderson and R. H. Blyth ... — Reginald Horace Blyth

Any enlightenment which requires to be authenticated, certified, recognized, congratulated, is (as yet) a false, or at least incomplete one. — Reginald Horace Blyth

A thief running away like mad from a ferocious watch-dog may be a splendid example of Zen. — Reginald Horace Blyth

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. — R.H. Blyth

The establishment of inner harmony is to be attained neither in the past nor in the future, but where the past and future meet, which is the now. When you have attained that point, neither future nor past, neither birth nor death, neither time nor space exist. It is that NOW which is liberation, which is perfect harmony, to which the men of the past and the men of the future must come. — Reginald Horace Blyth

Zen is the game of insight, the game of discovering who you are beneath the social masks. — Reginald Horace Blyth

The quality of your life is the outcome of your own thoughts — Laureli Blyth

What Mr Blyth has been engaged in was not love, my dear Francis. It was romance, a thing to which Mr Blyth has been very prone; together with melodrama. Whatever made you think that melodrama makes Mr Blyth uncomfortable? He revels in it. — Dorothy Dunnett

What is Zen? Zen means doing anything perfectly, making mistakes perfectly, being defeated perfectly, hesitating perfectly, doing anything perfectly or imperfectly, perfectly. What is the meaning of this perfectly? How does it differ from perfectly? Perfectly is in the will; perfectly is in the activity. Perfectly means that at each moment of the activity there is no egoism in it ... our pain is not only our own pain; it is the pain of the universe. The joy of the universe is also our joy. Our failure and misjudgment is that of nature, which never hopes or despairs, but keeps on trying. R. H. Blyth — R.H. Blyth

Two came here, Two flew off, - Butterflies. Chora3 In this verse, the ordinary poetical meaning is discarded; what remains is that dark flame of life that burns in all things. It is seen with the belly, not with the eye; with "bowels of compassion. — R.H. Blyth

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. — R.H. Blyth

She got in, as she had persuaded Jerott Blyth to bring her half across France, by force of logic, a kind of flat-chested innocence and the doggedness of a flower-pecker attacking a strangling fig. — Dorothy Dunnett

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

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

Zen is the unsymbolization of the world. — Reginald Horace Blyth

The truth is though, that Nefertiti stole his light the moment she left him holding her lifeless body on that bed, she stole his sun and his moon with her last breath, and he would never see sunlight or the sparkling stars again. They went with her. She was his sun, and his moon, and his whole world. From that night onwards, Akhenaten went completely, irrevocably blind, and his sight was extinguished into a world of never ending night. — Lanna Blyth

Perfect does not mean perfect actions in a perfect world, but appropriate actions in an imperfect one. — R.H. Blyth

Disdainful of fur and fretful, privately, about the cost of his buttons, Jerott Blyth sat like the born horseman he was, and watched discreetly for trouble. — Dorothy Dunnett

A haiku is not a poem, it is not literature; it is a hand beckoning, a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean. It is a way of returning to nature, to our moon nature, our cherry blossom nature, our falling leaf nature, in short, to our Buddha nature. — R.H. Blyth

Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That's my score to date. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through. — Iain Banks

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

Mud is the most poetical thing in the world. — Reginald Horace Blyth

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. — Reginald Horace Blyth

Part of what academics do is generate ideas and teach. The other, perhaps more important part, is to play the role of "the Bu*l*hit Police." Our job is to look at the ideas and plans interested parties put forward to solve our collective problems and see whether or not they pass the sniff test. Austerity as a route to growth and as the correct response to the aftermath of a financial crisis does not pass the sniff test. — Mark Blyth

All I said was that I thought it was a judgement from God that Blyth had first lost his leg and then had the replacement become the instrument of his downfall. All because of the rabbits. Eric, who was going through a religious phase at the time which I suppose I was to some extent copying, thought this was a terrible thing to say; God wasn't like that. I said the one I believed in was. — Iain Banks

In general, the deployment of austerity as economic policy has been as effective in bringing us peace, prosperity, and crucially, a sustained reduction of debt, as the Mongol Golden Horde was in furthering the development of Olympic dressage. — Mark Blyth

Things have done their part; it is for us to do ours ... — Reginald Horace Blyth

Regarding R. H. Blyth: For translations, the best books are still those by R. H. Blyth ... — Reginald Horace Blyth

There is no greater difference between men than between grateful and ungrateful people. — Reginald Horace Blyth

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. — R.H. Blyth

Zen is poetry; poetry is Zen. — Reginald Horace Blyth

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

I myself think that to have a cat is more important than to have a Bible. — Reginald Horace Blyth

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

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

The importance and unimportance of the self cannot be exaggerated. — R.H. Blyth

[W]omen's magazines know that more than two thirds of women pray each day so they tend to promote "spirituality" which is warm, soft, fuzzy, and "me-centered, " rather than religion, which is definitely not. Shot with a soft-focus lens, spirituality in women's media has morphed into another method of stress reduction. Lulling and inoffensive, spirituality is more about taking long walks and buying $65 Jo Malone scented candles than making ethical decisions or moral judgments. It's another way to calm ourselves, refresh ourselves, or applaud ourselves. — Myrna Blyth

We that change, hate change. And we that pass, love what abides. Ashes, darkness, dust. — Reginald Horace Blyth

Here's what a lot of the media want us to believe: One day, we'll get everything right about our appearance. Our hair will look fabulous, our skin will be smooth and crease-free, men will have perfect six-pack abs and we'll be three sizes smaller than we are now. We'll look so good we'll have made over not just our looks but our lives. — Myrna Blyth

Jerott's eyes and Philippa's met. 'When I meet my friend,' said Jerott Blyth carefully, 'there is likely to be a detonation which will take the snow off Mont Blanc. I advise you to seek other auspices. Philippa, I think we should go down below.'

'To swim?' said that unprepossessing child guilelessly. 'I can stand on my head.'

'Oh, Christ,' said Jerott morosely. 'Why in hell did you come?' The brown eyes within the damp, dun-coloured hair inspected him narrowly.

'Because you need a woman,' said Philippa finally. 'And I'm the nearest thing to it that you're likely to get. It was very short notice. — Dorothy Dunnett

Kids take up all available time - it's the basic law of parenthood. No matter how much time you give them, whether you work from eight to eight or are around the house all the time, you'll still feel you haven't been there enough for them. — Myrna Blyth

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

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

Freedom is not doing what you like, but liking what you do. — R.H. Blyth

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

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. — R.H. Blyth

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. — Reginald Horace Blyth

Every time you try to do something that anxiety wants to stop you from doing, you've struck a blow that will make the anxiety weaker. — Jamie Blyth