Author of quotes: Vsevolod Ovchinnikov

Japanese morality prescribes avoiding direct confrontation and not allowing situations where one side would completely prevail over the other. The defeated person must not be allowed to “lose face” and appear humiliated and insulted before others. This would mean touching such a painful chord as “weights” - a debt of honor, that is, making oneself a mortal enemy.

Both the Japanese and the English gardener see their goal not as imposing their will on nature, but only as emphasizing its natural beauty. Both Japanese and English chefs strive to bring out the natural taste of the product, in contrast to the ingenuity and sophistication of the masters of French and Chinese cuisine. Respect for the material, for what is created by nature, is a common feature of the applied art of the two island peoples.

Hearing the expression

With strictly defined movements, their beauty and regularity, the tea ceremony creates peace of mind, brings it to that state in which it responds especially sensitively to the omnipresent beauty of nature.

To rejoice or be sad about the changes that time brings with it is inherent in all peoples. But perhaps only the Japanese managed to see the fragility as a source of beauty.

When the Japanese say that a ceramist learns from clay, a carver learns from wood, and a chaser learns from metal, they mean exactly that. The artist already in the very choice of material is looking for exactly what would be able to respond to his idea.

The role of the artist is not to impose his idea on the material by force, but to help the material speak and express his own feelings in the language of this material that has come to life.

The Japanese believe that to maintain harmony is more important than to prove the correctness or to obtain benefits.

The Japanese joke that colleagues should be viewed as a relatives of his wife: like them or not - do they not go anywhere. And again destined to be in one team the entire working life, we must not forget that to spoil relations with a man is easier than to establish them.

Following the motto "everything has its place", the Japanese from time immemorial accustomed to divide women into three categories: home, for procreation - the wife; for the soul - geisha with her education; and finally to the flesh - the oiran, whose role since the ban on open prostitution took on the girls from bars and cabarets.

Even many Japanese jokes now that to invite a geisha so stupid as to order champagne at the bar. Drunk he won't, but will make it clear to the guest that is ready for him at any costs.

How, in fact, small bowl human pleasures and how wise are those who knows how to fill it.

Improving is better than perfection; completion better represents life than perfection. Therefore most able to reveal the beauty that is a work in which not all the agreed to finish.

In the West people either tell you the truth, or lying. The Japanese almost never lie, but they never come to mind to tell you the truth.