It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.
Knowledge leads to deception; talent and ability only serve to increase earthly desires.
To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is pleasure beyond compare.
Things that seem too common: too many furnishings where one is sitting; too many brushes around an inkstone; too many Buddhas in a home chapel; too many stones and trees and bushes in a garden courtyard; too many children and grandchildren in a house...
You should never put the new antlers of a deer to your nose and smell them. They have little insects that crawl into the nose and devour the brain.
