#soetsu yanagi

[elderjourney]

[ooscar88]

"The Kizaemon Tea-bowl ... Those who like the unusual are immune to the ordinary and if they are aware of it at all, they regard it as a negative virtue. They conceive active beauty as our duty. Yet the truth is odd. No Tea-bowl exceeds in Ido bowl in beauty." Soetsu Yanagi

[liquidlightandrunningtrees]

People often judge the level of a civilization by the amount of paper it uses. That, however, is simply a matter of volume, not quality. Quality is how the heart and soul of a civilization should be measured. How can bad paper and high civilization possibly be bedmates? One can gain a glimpse of the quality of a people’s life by the kind of paper they use for writing letters, for literary works, and for various other tasks. Paper should not be deprecated. To do so is to deprecate beauty itself.

Soetsu Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things

[mosscollector]

An elite group of artists may produce objects that are aesthetically pleasing, but that in itself doesn’t make the world around us any more beautiful. On the contrary, the influence of the ugly and deformed continues to grow ever stronger. If it is our ideal to live in a world surrounded by beautiful things, in a virtual Kingdom of Beauty, then we must raise the ordinary things of our daily lives to a higher level. The way to do this is not to place emphasis on appearance to the detriment of utility. (...) Utilitarian crafts have been looked down on as something of a lower rank. As a result, our aesthetic sense has been severely impaired owing to the fact that beauty and life are treated as separate realms of being. Beauty is no longer viewed as an indispensable part of our daily lives. Confining beauty to visual appreciation and excluding the beauty of practical objects has proven to be a grave error on the part of modern man.

Soetsu Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things, tr. Michael Brase

[peterarklenews]

© Peter Arkle 2024 BOOK

[noosphe-re]

People often judge the level of a civilization by the amount of paper it uses. That, however, is simply a matter of volume, not quality. Quality is how the heart and soul of a civilization should be measured. How can bad paper and high civilization possibly be bedmates? One can gain a glimpse of the quality of a people’s life by the kind of paper they use for writing letters, for literary works, and for various other tasks. Paper should not be deprecated. To do so is to deprecate beauty itself.

Soetsu Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things, translated by Michael Brase

[jamelalatise]

The intellect studies individual parts; intuition looks at the whole.

Soetsu Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things

[why-the-heck-not]

the small things