The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is… — Eugen Herrigel Copy Share Image
This means that the mind or spirit is present anywhere, because it is nowhere attached to any particular place. And it can remain present… — Eugen Herrigel Copy Share Image
You can learn from an ordinary bamboo leaf what ought to happen. It bends lower and lower under the weight of snow. Suddenly the snow slips to the ground without the leaf having stirred. Stay like that at the point of highest tension until the shot falls from you. So, indeed, it is: when the tension is fulfilled, the shot… — Eugen Herrigel Copy Share
The more a human being feels himself a self, tries to intensify this self and reach a never-attainable perfection, the more drastically he steps… — Eugen Herrigel Copy Share Image
“Don't think of what you have to do, don't consider how to carry it out!" he exclaimed. "The shot will only go smoothly when… — Eugen Herrigel Copy Share Image
I must only warn you of one thing. You have become a different person in the course of these years. For this is what the art of archery means: a profound and far-reaching contest of the archer with himself. Perhaps you have hardly noticed it yet, but you will feel it very strongly when you meet your friends and acquaintances… — Eugen Herrigel Copy Share
Assuming that his talent can survive the increasing strain, there is one scarcely avoidable danger that lies ahead of the pupil on his road… — Eugen Herrigel Copy Share Image
He grows daily more capable of following any inspiration without technical effort, and also of letting inspiration come to him through meticulous observation. — Eugen Herrigel Copy Share Image
Often nothing keeps the pupil on the move but his faith in his teacher, whose mastery is now beginning to dawn on him … How far the pupil will go is not the concern of the teacher and master. Hardly has he shown him the right way when he must let him go on alone. There is only one thing… — Eugen Herrigel Copy Share
“And what impels him to repeat this process at every single lesson, and, with the same remorseless insistence, to make his pupils copy it without the least alteration? He sticks to this traditional custom because he knows from experience that the preparations for working put him simultaneously in the right frame of mind for creating. The meditative repose in which… — Eugen Herrigel Copy Share
The spider dances her web without knowing there are flies that will get caught in it. The fly, dancing nonchalantly on a sunbeam gets… — Eugen Herrigel Copy Share Image
In the case of archery, the hitter and the hit are no longer two opposing objects, but are one reality. — Eugen Herrigel Copy Share Image
