Frederick Franck > Quotes

“Art is neither a profession nor a hobby. Art is a Way of being.

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― Frederick Franck, A Passion for Seeing: On Being an Image Maker

“It is wise to avoid militants of all plumage, to trust only the fanatically unfanatic”
― Frederick Franck, A Little Compendium on That Which Matters

“On the exoteric level the traditions are irreconcilable. On the esoteric, experiential level of the heart reigns an eloquent, reverential silence.”
― Frederick Franck, A Little Compendium on That Which Matters

“Satori (enlightenment) is described as nothing seeing itself as such.”
― Frederick Franck, The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School and Its Contemporaries

“We have a belief that we need not believe in, no dogmas, no ritual, no mythology, no church, no priest, no holy book--what a relief!”
― Frederick Franck

“This book is handwritten because, in its way, it is a love letter, and love letters should not be typeset by compositors or computers.”
― Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation

“Self, stands in contradistinction to the Hindu doctrine of Atman”
― Frederick Franck, The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School and Its Contemporaries

“It takes place on a dimension higher than that of science (or scientism) or common sense.”
― Frederick Franck, The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School and Its Contemporaries

“When drawing a face, any face, it is as if a curtain after curtain, mask after mask, falls away.. until a final mask remains, one that can no longer be removed, reduced. By the time the drawing is finished, I know a great deal about that face, for no face can hide itself for long. But although nothing escapes the eye, all is forgiven beforehand. The eye does not judge, moralize, criticize. It accepts the masks in gratitude as it does the long bamboos being long, the goldenrod being being yellow.”
― Frederick Franck, The Zen of seeing

“The only way to remove permanently the risk of ultimate catastrophe is to abolish war altogether. War must cease to be an admissible social institution. We must learn to resolve our disputes by means other than military confrontation.”
― Frederick Franck, What Does It Mean to Be Human?: Reverence for Life Reaffirmed by Responses from Around the World

“The true Self or Buddha-nature is precisely this nothingness or emptiness (sunyata).”
― Frederick Franck, The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School and Its Contemporaries

“It is a nothingness unattainable by the intellect.”
― Frederick Franck, The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School and Its Contemporaries

“This highly enigmatic concept of the storehouse consciousness, which some
Western scholars have aptly or inaptly tried to liken to Jung's collective unconscious,”
― Frederick Franck, The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School and Its Contemporaries

“My earliest recollection of blues is hearing it in Memphis as a kid in the fifties. It came from the black workers in the fields along Cyprus Creek near the dead-end road I lived on with my mother. The emotion I felt in that music wrapped itself around me and touched my heart. It was very comforting. It gave my loneliness and sadness a sweetness. A kind of hope. Their blues expressed how I felt, too. My parents were divorced; I was an only child; I felt alone as my mother worked long and late hours. I was adrift and out of place when blues floated in like a dream and touched my heart. The blues rescued me. That’s when the blues overtook me. Over the years blues have continued to express how I feel as a human being. Now, more than forty years later, as I work as a blues musician, the music I heard as a kid”
― Frederick Franck, What Does It Mean to Be Human?: Reverence for Life Reaffirmed by Responses from Around the World