Sōseki Natsume Quotes

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...

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...

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 the...

It is painfully easy to define human beings. They are beings who, for no good reason at all, create their own unnecessary suffering.

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 that...

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 is n...

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 eas...

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 are...

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 ideals...

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 tha...

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 of...

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 and...

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 i...

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 touch...

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 myself t...

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 to a...

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

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

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

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 any...