Eugen Herrigel Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

Assuming that his talent can survive the increasing strain, there is one scarcely avoidable danger that lies ahead of the pupil on his road to mastery.

Eugen Herrigel
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 that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.

Eugen Herrigel
By letting go of yourself, leaving yourself and everything yours behind so decisively that nothing more is left of you but a purposeless tension.

Eugen Herrigel
The hand that guides the brush has already caught and executed what floated before the mind at the same moment the mind began to form it, and in the end the pupil no longer knows which of the two-mind or hand -was responsible for the work.

Eugen Herrigel
In the case of archery, the hitter and the hit are no longer two opposing objects, but are one reality.

Eugen Herrigel
This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.

Eugen Herrigel
The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You do not wait for fulfilment, but brace yourself for failure.

Eugen Herrigel
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
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 out of the center of being.

Eugen Herrigel
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 must fall, it must fall from the archer like snow from a bamboo leaf, before he even thinks it.

Eugen Herrigel
Don't think of what you have to do, don't consider how to carry it out! The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise. It must be as if the bowstring suddenly cut through the thumb that held it. You mustn't open the right hand on purpose.

Eugen Herrigel