Quotes by Sseki Natsume

“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 believeand I believe...”

“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 ...”

“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. ...”

“Watch birth and death:The lotus has alreadyOpened its flower.”

“But facts, remembered or not, are all, alas, still facts”

“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 ...”

“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 a...”

“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 societyeverything was other-centered, which means t...”

“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 theres a certain type of person in the world who conforms to the idea of a bad person'? Youll never find someone who fits that mold neatly, you know. On the whole, all people are...”

“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, youre always unsteady on your legs. You cant find your courage. Youll go to any length to avoid what displeases you, and you gallop after whatever you want. And why is that? There is n...”

“Hirota feels strongly drawn toward nature and the natural, is hyper-sensitive to the artificialparticularly that most cramped and constraining man-made creation, societyand does his best to avoid it.”

“I may be someone who was always destined to spend my life wandering aimlessly. I cant settle down. The cruel part is, I want to settle down and the world wont let me. So what choice do I have but t...”

“Reflection may be essential to a scholar, but its taboo in social intercourse.”

“People may make fun of me because Im wearing something odd, but its still good to be alive.”

“Its so unrewarding, being a woman.”

“It's like the frog that tried to outdo the cow...see, the consequences are reflected in each of us as individuals. A people so oppressed by the West have no mental leisure, they can't do anything w...”

“The average novel invariably reads like a detective's report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective.”