62 quotes found
“Desire is a frightening thing.”
“It’s so unrewarding, being a woman.”
“People forget their faces when they're busy.”
“Your addiction to thinking will come back to haunt you.”
“But facts, remembered or not, are all, alas, still facts”
“Watch birth and death:The lotus has alreadyOpened its flower.”
“Use your intellect to guide you, and you will end up putting peopleoff. Rely on your emotions, and you will forever be pushed around.Force your will on others, and you will live in constant tension...”
“I am an inconsistent creature. Perhaps it is the pressure of my past, and not my own perverse mind, that has made me into this contradictory being. I am all too well aware of this fault in myself. ...”
“Tokyo is bigger than Kumamoto. And Japan is bigger than Tokyo. And even bigger than Japan... Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don't ever surrender yourself ― not to Japan, not to ...”
“The average novel invariably reads like a detective's report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective.”
“It was Daisuke's conviction that all morality traced its origins to social realities. He believed there could be no greater confusion of cause and effect than to attempt to conform social reality t...”
“To tell you the truth, I used to consider it a disgrace to be found ignorant by other people. But now, I find that I am not ashamed of knowing less than others, and I'm less inclined to force mysel...”
“If he let one day pass without glancing at a single page, habit led him to feel a vague sense of decay. Therefore, in the face of most intrusions, he tried to arrange it so that he could stay in to...”
“My love for her was close to piety. You may think it strange that I should use this word, with its religious connotation, to describe my feeling towards a woman. But even now I believe—and I believ...”
“According to his thinking, man was not born for a particular purpose. Quite the opposite: a purpose developed only with the birth of an individual. To objectively fabricate a purpose at the outset ...”
“Daisuke was the sort of man who, once he was disturbed by something, no matter what, could not let go of it until he had pursued it to the utmost. Moreover, having the capacity to assess the folly ...”
“When I was a student, there wasn't a single thing we did that was unrelated to others. It was all for the Emperor, or parents, or the country, or society—everything was other-centered, which means ...”
“But once I could look back on it in a calmer frame of mind, it struck me that his motive was surely not so simple and straightforward. Had it resulted from a fatal collision between reality and ide...”
“But do you imagine there’s a certain type of person in the world who conforms to the idea of a ‘bad person'? You’ll never find someone who fits that mold neatly, you know. On the whole, all people ...”
“The call for political freedom took place long ago. The call for freedom of speech is also a thing of the past. Freedom is not a word to be used exclusively for phenomena such as this which are so ...”
“As I see it, you’re always unsteady on your legs. You can’t find your courage. You’ll go to any length to avoid what displeases you, and you gallop after whatever you want. And why is that? There i...”
“Your brother is a sensitive person. Aesthetically, ethically, and intellectually he is in fact hypersensitive. As a result, it would seem that he was born only to torture himself. He has none of th...”
“It is painfully easy to define human beings. They are beings who, for no good reason at all, create their own unnecessary suffering.”
“Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of “character” or that kind of “character,” and readers pretend to talk knowingly about “character,” but all it amounts to is that t...”
