A Beginner's Guide to Japan

Everything is deeply personal; it just has nothing to do with you.

A Japanese psychiatrist asked every prospective patient to keep a daily journal. He consented to see each one only after all her sentences were devoted to the world outside her.

“It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.”

Words only separate what silence brings together.

Soon after the war, Japan’s most assertive novelist, Yukio Mishima, published a book whose title—Confessions of a Mask—was pure Wilde, as were its sentiments: “It is precisely what people regard as my true self that is a masquerade.”

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

“Consistency,” Wilde declared in an essay, “is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

In Buddhism, the opposite of pleasure is not pain but delusion.

“I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be,” said Cary Grant, “until finally I became that person. Or he became me.”

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.