asih simanis

“Society cannot be proud when a product is available only to a select few...Equating the expensive with the beautiful cannot be a point of pride.”
― Soetsu Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things

“Under the snow's reflected light creeping into the houses, beneath the dim lamplight, various types of manual work is taken up. This is how time is forgotten; this is how work absorbs the hours and days. If time remains unused, winter becomes a curse.”
― Soetsu Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things

“What is the proper way of seeing? In brief, it is to see things as they are. However, very few people possess this purity of sight. That is, such people are not seeing things as they are, but are influenced by preconceptions. 'Knowing' has been added to 'seeing'.”
― Soetsu Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things

“Paradoxically, it is friendship that often offers us the real route to the pleasures that Romanticism associates with love. That this sounds surprising is only a reflection of how underdeveloped our day-to-day vision of friendship has become. We associate it with a casual acquaintance we see only once in a while to exchange inconsequential and shallow banter. But real friendship is something altogether more profound and worthy of exultation. It is an arena in which two people can get a sense of each other’s vulnerabilities, appreciate each other’s follies without recrimination, reassure each other as to their value and greet the sorrows and tragedies of existence with wit and warmth. Culturally and collectively, we have made a momentous mistake which has left us both lonelier and more disappointed than we ever needed to be. In a better world, our most serious goal would be not to locate one special lover with whom to replace all other humans but to put our intelligence and energy into identifying and nurturing a circle of true friends. At the end of an evening, we would learn to say to certain prospective companions, with an embarrassed smile as we invited them inside – knowing that this would come across as a properly painful rejection – ‘I’m so sorry, couldn’t we just be … lovers?”
― The School of Life (PUK Rights), The School of Life: An Emotional Education