Herrigel Zen Quotes & Sayings

I have to hold that up as a metaphor for everything, being prepared and then being brave enough to just be there. Just listen and follow, maybe jump. Everyone leans in, it brings them into your emotional vicinity because, you said "Risk creates intimacy — Mary-Louise Parker

In the classic Zen in the Art of Archery, Eugen Herrigel's teacher urged him always to take his next shot unburdened by previous failures to hit the target; as he improved, his teacher urged him not to be influenced by his successes either, to stay in the present moment. — Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Zen Buddhism does not preach. Sermons remain words. It waits until people feel stifled and insecure, driven by a secret longing. — Eugen Herrigel

Nothing is build, just like that, everything around the world has some value and the purpose. — Santosh Kalwar

This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose. — Eugen Herrigel

When men are prosperous, they are in love with life. Nature grows beautiful, the arts begin to flourish, there is work for painter and sculptor, the poet is born, the stage is erected - and this life with which men are in love is represented in a thousand forms. — Robert Green Ingersoll

And what impels him to repeat this process at every single lesson, and, with the same remorseless insistence, to make his pupils copy it without the least alteration? He sticks to this traditional custom because he knows from experience that the preparations for working put him simultaneously in the right frame of mind for creating. The meditative repose in which he performs them gives him that vital loosening and equability of all his powers, that collectedness and presence of mind, without which no right work can be done. — Eugen Herrigel

M. de Rollebon was my partner; he needed me in order to exist and I needed him so as not to feel my existence. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The right art," cried the Master, "is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen. — Eugen Herrigel

Everyone became brave from excess of terror. — Gustave Flaubert

I don't hold memories in my hand, but I'll never let them go. — Esther M. Friesner

Don't think of what you have to do, don't consider how to carry it out!" he exclaimed. "The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise. — Eugen Herrigel

You have described only too well," replied the Master, "where the difficulty lies ... The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You ... brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice but to call forth something yourself that ought to happen independently of you, and so long as you call it forth your hand will not open in the right way
like the hand of a child. — Eugen Herrigel

He could hear his granny speaking. "No one's too poor to buy soap." Of course, many people were. But in Cockbill Street they bought soap just the same. The table might not have any food on it but, by gods, it was well scrubbed. That was Cockbill Street, where what you mainly ate was your pride. — Terry Pratchett

You worry yourself unnecessarily. Put the thought of hitting right out of your mind! — Eugen Herrigel

The Master's warning that we should not practice anything except self-detaching immersion. — Eugen Herrigel

Being able to wait without purpose in the state of highest tension ... without continually asking yourself: Shall I be able to manage it? Wait patiently, as see what comes - and how it comes! — Eugen Herrigel

I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other. — Napoleon Bonaparte