Top 82 Soseki Natsume Quotes
#3. The trouble with women is that they talk too much. It would be good if human beings would keep as silent as this cat.
Soseki Natsume
#4. The plain fact is that humans, one and all, are merely thieves at heart.
Soseki Natsume
#5. I don't like argumentation. You men do it a lot, don't you? You seem to enjoy it. I'm always amazed at how men can go on and on, happily passing around the empty cup of some futile discussion
Soseki Natsume
#6. The artist, even when he imitates nature, always feels himself to be not a slave but a demigod.
Soseki Natsume
#7. I am not as hard as I seem. For the right person, I too could shed a few tears.
Soseki Natsume
#8. To be as comfortably off as you are is, after all, the best way to be.
Soseki Natsume
#9. Had I the time to keep a diary, I'd use that time to better effect; sleeping on the veranda.
Soseki Natsume
#10. You must not speak ill of other persons. After all, everyone dies when their allotted span is over.
Soseki Natsume
#11. We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It is the price we pay for these times of ours.
Soseki Natsume
#12. Even the works of Shakespeare might be more thoroughly appreciated if they were re-examined from unorthodox positions. Someone, once in a while, should take a good long look at Hamlet through his legs.
Soseki Natsume
#13. London is a city that offers all kinds of temptations, and whenever I go for a walk I discover things that I would like to bring back as souvenirs. But my resources are very limited. I cannot buy anything, and I make a point of taking my walks a good distance from these riches.
Soseki Natsume
#14. You have a fine scholar's way with words, I must say. You're good at empty reasoning.
Soseki Natsume
#15. Reflection may be essential to a scholar, but it's taboo in social intercourse.
Soseki Natsume
#16. Just as you can only really smell incense in the first moments after it is lit, or taste wine in that instant of the first sip, the impulse of love springs from a single, perilous moment in time, I feel.
Soseki Natsume
#17. It would seem that for my master a book is not a thing to be read, but a device to bring on slumber: a typographical sleeping-pill, a paginated security blanket.
Soseki Natsume
#18. Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head.
Soseki Natsume
#19. But sick or well, humans are fragile creatures, you know. There's no anticipating how or when they might die, or for what reason
Soseki Natsume
#20. Your addiction to thinking will come back to haunt you.
Soseki Natsume
#21. It's a shame that an education just gives people the means to chop logic
Soseki Natsume
#22. Hirota feels strongly drawn toward nature and the natural, is hyper-sensitive to the artificial - particularly that most cramped and constraining man-made creation, society - and does his best to avoid it.
Soseki Natsume
#23. How deep, how recondite this seeming petty heart,
In whose recesses right and wrong lie dimmed by distance.
Soseki Natsume
#24. In past summers when I had been home, I had often tasted a strange sadness as I sat quietly in the midst of the seething cicada song. This sorrow seemed to pierce deep into my heart along with the piercing insect cry. Always at such times I would sit alone and still, gazing into myself.
Soseki Natsume
#25. Tea is, in fact, a marvelous drink. To those who spurn it on the grounds of insomnia, I say that it's better to be deprived of sleep than of tea.
Soseki Natsume
#26. There was a large crowd around us, and every face in it looked happy. We had little opportunity to talk until we reached the woods, where there were no flowers and no people.
Soseki Natsume
#27. I believe that words uttered in passion contain a greater living truth than do those words which express thoughts rationally conceived. It is blood that moves the body. Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things.
Soseki Natsume
#28. Saku's figure before me looked like a morning glory drawn with one stroke of the brush. My only regret was that the drawing was not by the hand of a master.
Soseki Natsume
#29. From this observed behavior a major psychological truth about this race of forked destroyers may be deduced: that, just as nature abhors a vacuum, "mankind abhors equality."
Soseki Natsume
#30. Into the field of
Yellow flowers
The red setting sun!
Soseki Natsume
#31. Even the greatest of painters cannot produce, however strenuously he exerts himself in pursuit of variety, more than 12 or 13 individual masterpieces. So it is natural that mankind should marvel at God's astonishing and singlehanded achievement in the production of people.
Soseki Natsume
#32. Under the sun the couple presented smiles to the world. Under the moon, they were lost in thought: and so they had quietly passed the years.
Soseki Natsume
#33. Our hearts parted a long time ago, and I was wrong to think they could be brought together again.
Soseki Natsume
#35. I will not hesitate to cast upon you the shadow thrown by the darkness of human life. But do not be afraid. Gaze steadfastly into this darkness, and find there the things that will be of use to you.
Soseki Natsume
#36. Some say that life has no form, that it is extremely diffuse. I think I can agree with them ... A life without conclusions is painful.
Soseki Natsume
#37. How to adjust to a world in which the climax of a scene - and sometimes the central event - is going to sleep? We're going to have to adapt, maybe even invert our sense of priority and our assumptions about what constitutes drama, as most of us foreigners have to do when traveling to Japan.
Pico Iyer
#38. On a charcoal kiln a vine keeps climbing, while being burned to death.
Soseki Natsume
#39. I thought of the new stone, of my new wife, and of the newly buried white bones beneath us, and I felt that fate had made sport of us all.
Soseki Natsume
#40. I may be someone who was always destined to spend my life wandering aimlessly. I can't settle down. The cruel part is, I want to settle down and the world won't let me. So what choice do I have but to become a fugitive?
Soseki Natsume
#41. If a man starts a campaign on my behalf without consulting me, he's just toying with my existence. Think how much better off you'd be to have your existence ignored. At least your reputation wouldn't suffer!
Soseki Natsume
#42. There was nothing so very unfamiliar about the excitement she was feeling, and yet it felt always like a new excitement. It was, in other words, a perennially unfamiliar feeling.
Soseki Natsume
#43. An artist is a person who lives in the triangle which remains after the angle which we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world.
Soseki Natsume
#44. People may make fun of me because I'm wearing something odd, but it's still good to be alive.
Soseki Natsume
#45. The average novel invariably reads like a detective's report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective.
Soseki Natsume
#46. Thus, as I review the list of my friends and acquaintances, most of them emerge as stained with maniac stigmata of one sort or another. I begin to feel considerably reassured. The truth may simply be that human society is no more than a massing of lunatics.
Soseki Natsume
#47. The prime fact is that all humans are puffed up by their extreme self-satisfaction with their own brute power. Unless some creatures more powerful than humans arrive on earth to bully them, there's just no knowing to what dire lengths their fool presumptuousness will eventually carry them.
Soseki Natsume
#48. But when luck is running against one, nothing goes well.
Soseki Natsume
#49. If the Creator should take the line that I am born to work and not to sleep, I would agree that I am indeed born to work but I would also make the unanswerable point that I cannot work unless I also rest.
Soseki Natsume
#50. No matter how full one's head might be with the image of greatness, one was useless, I found out, unless one was a worthy man first.
Soseki Natsume
#51. Secretiveness is a most mysterious matter. However well one guards a secret, sooner or later it's bound to come out.
Soseki Natsume
#52. Where joy grows deep, sorrow must deepen; the greater one's pleasures, the greater the pain.
Soseki Natsume
#53. To be able to muster so many complaints about one little thing - yes, you'll get ahead, that's for sure.
Soseki Natsume
#54. Until then I had floated at random, like a rootless aquatic plant, relying entirely on the opinions of others.
Soseki Natsume
#55. The world's evaluations of an individual's social worth, like the slits in my eyeballs, change with time and circumstance. In point of fact my pupil-slits vary but modestly between broad and narrow, but mankind's judgements turn somersaults and cartwheels for no conceivable reason.
Soseki Natsume
#56. And men who accept the burdens of regret, whether in respect of watercolors or of anything else, are not the stuff that men of the world are made of.
Soseki Natsume
#57. Age should never meddle with such a matter. Mind your own business.
Soseki Natsume
#58. My hand may slip from lack of practice, but I do not believe my clumsy writing derives from an agitated mind.
Soseki Natsume
#59. The poet has an obligation to dissect his own corpse and reveal the symptoms of its illness to the world.
Soseki Natsume
#60. When someone in privileged circumstances gets a bit bewildered or stymied or maybe stumbles, the light he sees things in will change. But seeing things in a different light doesn't mean he's changed his vantage point.
Soseki Natsume
#61. But to my questions he gave replies so vague that one could not tell whether they came from the mountains or the sea.
Soseki Natsume
#62. People really didn't change very much, he thought; they only decayed.
Soseki Natsume
#63. If whiskers establish sauciness, every cat is impudent.
Soseki Natsume
#65. But it speaks for an inner world - and again this is evident in Murakami - that sits in a different dimension from the smooth-running, flawlessly attentive, and all but anonymous machine that keeps public order moving forward so efficiently in Japan.
Pico Iyer
#66. 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 believe it very strongly - that true love is not so far removed from religious faith.
Soseki Natsume
#67. From then on, my thesis hung over me like a curse, and with bloodshot eyes, I worked like a madman.
Soseki Natsume
#68. Of all the tribulations in this world, boredom is the one most hard to bear.
Soseki Natsume
#69. He framed a question inwardly to his vanity: 'Will this be tougher than I thought?
Soseki Natsume
#70. His grin seemed to say, "It is, for some strange reason, considered proper to congratulate people on such occasions as this.
Soseki Natsume
#71. I am an honest man by nature, but as I live in society I try not to arouse anyone's resentment and sometimes I am compelled to lie in this endeavour. As soon as honesty becomes compatible with daily social life, I will stop telling such lies.
Soseki Natsume
#72. (on his thought on excessive nationalism) ...the country was no doubt very important, but that there was no need at all to act the clown by talking about it all the time, as if one were completely possessed by it.
Soseki Natsume
#73. I would guess that he thought and thought for at least ten years before he came up with a stupendous idea, that glory of man's inventiveness, pants.
Soseki Natsume
#74. The autumn leaves, arranged in two or three scarlet terraces among the pine-trees, have fallen like ancient dreams.
Soseki Natsume
#75. When people who have been close don't see each other for a time, they become strangers. But when two people live together, no matter how bad things may get between them, they somehow manage to stay close. I suppose human beings are made that way.
Soseki Natsume
#77. A world where falling in love requires marrying is a world where novels require reading from beginning to end.
Soseki Natsume
#78. The memory of having sat at someone's feet will later make you want to trample him underfoot.
Soseki Natsume
#80. Anyone who sang the praises of undying love in this day and age belonged to the first rank of hypocrites in Daisuke's estimate.
Soseki Natsume
#81. Did you not come to me because you felt there was something lacking?'
'Yes. But my going to you was not the same thing as wanting to fall in love.
Soseki Natsume
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
