Another quality of Zen art is its understatement or restraint.
This was the beginning of the tradition of deliberate understatement later to be so important in the tea ceremony.
Hence, if one must sin on the side of accurate valuation of news, let him err in favor of understatement rather than exaggeration.
The value of understatement cannot be overestimated.
Overstatement is regarded as a vice, and understatement as a sort of modest virtue, whilst in fact they are both untruthful, exactly in the degree of their departure from perfect accuracy.
The English love of understatement is even more visible in moral than in material things.
This is what the habit of understatement may bring us down to,--absolute inadequacy.
Now, needless to say, it would be understatement if I were not to admit that the year 1973 was not a very easy year for me personally or for my family.
It is an understatement to say that no appreciable harm would be caused by, and substantial benefit would accrue from, decreasing the amount of printing now done by at least one-half.
But there was malice in that understatement of Talleyrand's; and there is none in the understatement of this Frenchman.
