Quotes by Japanese Authors - Page 10

Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell.
Haruki Murakami
Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.
Haruki Murakami
Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love.
Miyamoto Musashi
It is very simple, actually. It is because you and Tengo were so powerfully drawn to each other.
Haruki Murakami
Nestled next to me, she nodded. “I’m fine. As long as I take the medicine. So don’t worry.” She leaned her head back against my shoulder. “But don’t ask me anything, okay? Why that happened.”“Understood. No questions,” I said.“Thank you very much for today,” she said.“What part of today?”“For taking me to the river. For giving me water from your mouth. For putting up with me.”I looked at her. Her lips were right in front of me. The lips I had kissed as I gave her water. And once more those lips seemed to be seeking me. Slightly parted, with her beautiful white teeth barely visible. I could still feel her soft tongue, which I’d touched slightly as I gave her water. I found it hard to breathe, and I couldn’t think. My body burned. She wants me, I thought. And I want her.
Haruki Murakami
When you sneak into somebody’s backyard, it does seem that guts and curiosity are working together. Curiosity can bring guts out of hiding at times, maybe even get them going. But curiosity usually evaporates. Guts have to go for the long haul. Curiosity’s like a fun friend you can’t really trust. It turns you on and then it leaves you to make it on your own-with whatever guts you can muster.
Haruki Murakami
When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder.
Ruth Ozeki
Taoism as the "art of being in the world," for it deals with the present—ourselves. It is in us that God meets with Nature, and yesterday parts from to-morrow. The Present is the moving Infinity, the legitimate sphere of the Relative. Relativity seeks Adjustment; Adjustment is Art. The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.
Kakuzō Okakura
Takan had never truly defeated Zyid. Zyid had given his life to calm Takan's soul.
Isamu Fukui
When it was too late for rescue, it was still early enough for revenge.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge,” Aomame said.“Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire’s budget deficits. It has no moral significance.
Haruki Murakami
Spending plenty of time on something can be the most sophisticated form of revenge.
Haruki Murakami
Reunion will come.
Atsuko Asano
My body is tired as worn out rug, but my brain (if i had) is always full of curiosity, jumping around for seeking new funs. If they could learn how to be cooperative each others, my life could be way easier... sigh*
Hiroko Sakai
Do not despair at being an unsung hero. Always keep in your heart the desire to do what is right for mankind.
Maejima Hisoka
Times of sadness are the very moment to laugh and laugh greatly.
Masaharu Taniguchi
Fate seems to be taking me in some even stranger directions.
Haruki Murakami
The ocean was one of the greatest things he had ever seen in his life—bigger and deeper than anything he had imagined. It changed its color and shape and expression according to time and place and weather. It aroused a deep sadness in his heart, and at the same time it brought his heart peace and comfort.
Haruki Murakami
When I first accepted my own death, the world was intantly changed. It was a completely new sensation. It took something like this to finally open my eyes. Before, I had simply shut myself off so that I could not see, could not hear. What had I been doing all this time?
Mohiro Kitoh
The world is full of ways and means to waste time
Haruki Murakami
People SHOULD be doubted. Many people misunderstand this concept. Doubting people is just a part of getting to know them. What many people call ‘trust’ is really just giving up on trying to understand others, and that very act is far worse than doubting. It is actually ‘apathy.
Shinobu Kaitani
Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent...?
Shūsaku Endō
Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one's development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one's ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Put a tiger on your tank
murakami
Maybe that's why people don't like you. You make it obvious you don't care whether people like you or not. That makses some people angry.
Haruki Murakami
I don't think most people would like my personality. There might be a few -- very few, I would imagine- who are impressed by it, but rarely would anyone like it.
Haruki Murakami
Every human personality is the product of an innate drive to create something unique from one’s raw individual experience.
Tadahiko Nagao
Today's politicians are like policemen on traffic duty. They are just dealing with traffic right in front of them. Yet they want to be the Superintendent based on that alone. The politicians and the bigwigs in finance have no ambition. There are too many who confuse the power that they got by their position as their own ability.
Jirō Shirasu
My mind was not that of a conqueror, but that of a cow that spends its life chewing contentedly in the meadow of invoices, waiting for the train of eternal grace to pass by. How good it felt to exist without pride of ambition. To live in hibernation.
Amélie Nothomb
A day in a man’s life is constructed according to whether he accepts or rejects flashes of inspiration.
Eiji Yoshikawa
The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be.
Haruki Murakami
It was––how shall I put it?––a painfully solitary building. Let me explain. Say we have a concept. It goes without saying that there will be slight exceptions to that norm. Now, over time these exceptions spread like stains until finally they form a separate concept. To which other exceptions crop up. It was that kind of building, some ancient life form that had evolved blindly, toward who knows what end.
Haruki Murakami
What kind of man will feel depressed at being idle? There is nothing finer than to be alone with nothing to distract him.If you follow the ways of the world, your heart will be drawn to its sensual defilements and easily led astray; if you go among people, your words will be guided by others' responses rather than come from your heart. There is nothing firm or stable in a life spent between larking about together and quarreling exuberant one moment, aggrieved and resentful the next. You are forever pondering pros and cons, endlessly absorbed in questions of gain and loss. And on top of delusion comes drunkenness, and in that drunkenness you dream.
Yoshida Kenkō
Not being able to find the right words at crucial times is one of my many problems.
Haruki Murakami
I don’t think it’s right that I’m part of the problem. I can’t be part of the solution if I’m part of the problem
Haruki Murakami
Unless you find the fundamental cause and treat that, the same problem will surface later on in a different form.
Haruki Murakami
At the moment of giving birth to a child, is the mother separate from the child? You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.
Dogen Zenji
When she had him along, the world looked different, and she liked the way she saw things she'd never seen before. . . But she noticed other things, too -- the way she herself felt acutely visible with the baby in her arms, and the way some people's faces lit up when they saw a child. His warm weight was like living ballast, thrumming with energy, giving her substance. Folks were drawn to that.
Ruth Ozeki
Know the rules of child rearing!!Rule one: Physical strength!Rule two: Physical strength!There are no rules three or four, but rule five is physical strength!
Kaoru Mori
Leave it to the Americans to use love as a motivational tool while challenging insects to declare whether they are with you or against you.
Taiyo Fujii
Anywhere there is life, there are eyes. And things, too, speak to those who have ears to hear.
Eiji Yoshikawa
To know aberrations is to become involved with them.
NisiOisiN
Maybe all of us at Hailsam had little secrets like that -- little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone without fears and longing.
Kazuo Ishiguro
But the aspect of secrets is they leak out. If they didn't leak, they wouldn't be interesting.
CLAMP
The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink, night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things. . . . When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living. To do this twenty-four hours a day is the Way of Haiku. It is having life more abundantly.
R.H. Blyth
Umasi kept walking, out of sight and into the glittering night. Meahwhile, Zen lay alone, defeated on the cold ground, knowing that he had truly been left behind. Then the memories returned, and for the first time in his life, he cried.
Isamu Fukui
What is Zen? Zen means doing anything perfectly, making mistakes perfectly, being defeated perfectly, hesitating perfectly, doing anything perfectly or imperfectly, perfectly. What is the meaning of this perfectly? How does it differ from perfectly? Perfectly is in the will; perfectly is in the activity. Perfectly means that at each moment of the activity there is no egoism in it… our pain is not only our own pain; it is the pain of the universe. The joy of the universe is also our joy. Our failure and misjudgment is that of nature, which never hopes or despairs, but keeps on trying. R. H. Blyth
R.H. Blyth
Thus we see that the all important thing is not killing or giving life, drinking or not drinking, living in the town or the country, being unlucky or lucky, winning or losing. It is how we win, how we lose, how we live or die, finally, how we choose.
R.H. Blyth
These are some of the characteristics of the state of mind which the creation and appreciation of haiku demand: Selflessness, Loneliness, Grateful Acceptance, Wordlessness, Non-intellectuality, Contradictoriness, Humor, Freedom, Non-morality, Simplicity, Materiality, Love, and Courage.
R.H. Blyth
To enter the Buddha Way is to stop discriminating between good and evil and to cast aside the mind that says this is good and that is bad.
Dōgen
Every man possesses the Buddha-nature. Do not demean yourselves.
Dōgen
Even though you read much Zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind. You should not say, “I know what Zen is,” or “I have attained enlightenment.” This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner.”-“When you are sitting in the middle of your own problem, which is more real to you: your problem or you yourself? The awareness that you are here, right now, is the ultimate fact. ”-“Knowing that your life is short, to enjoy it day after day, moment after moment, is the life of “form is form and emptiness is emptiness.”-“You may feel as if you are doing something special, but actually it is only the expression of your true nature; it is the activity which appeases your inmost desire. But as long as you think you are practicing zazen for the sake of something, that is not true practice.”-“The most important thing is to forget all gaining ideas, all dualistic ideas. In other words, just practice zazen in a certain posture.
Shunryu Suzuki
The essence of your mind is not born, so it will never die. It is not an existence, which is perishable. It is not an emptiness, which is a mere void. It has neither colour nor form. It enjoys no pleasures and suffers no pains.I know you are very ill. Like a good Zen student, you are facing that sickness squarely. You may not know exactly who is suffering, but question yourself: What is the essence of this mind? Think only of this. You will need no more. Covet nothing. Your end which is endless is as a snowflake dissolving in pure air.
Bassui Takusho
The object of our lives is to look at, listen to, touch, taste things. Without them—these sticks, stones, feathers, shells—there is no Deity.
R.H. Blyth
I hope that I am making myself understood. The Golden Temple once more appeared before me. Or rather, I should say that the breast was transformed into the Golden Temple.
Yukio Mishima
Zen is nothing to get excited about.
Shunryu Suzuki
One master defines Zen as the art of feeling the polar star in the southern sky. Truth can be reached only through the comprehension of opposites.
Kakuzō Okakura
Before we were born we had no feeling; we were one with the universe. This is called "mind-only," or "essence of mind," or "big mind," After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life.
Shunryu Suzuki
Zen is a double-edged sword, killing words and thoughts, yet at the same time, giving them life. Although beyond human intellect and philosophy, Zen is their root and source.
Masao Abe
13. A Buddha In Tokyo in th Meiji era there lived two prominent teachers of opposite characteristics. One, Unsho, an instructor in Shingon, kept Buddha's precepts scrupulously. He never drank intoxicants, nor did he eat after eleven o'clock in the morning. The other teacher, Tanzan, a professor of philosophy at the Imperial University, never observed the precepts. When he felt like eating he ate, and when he felt like sleeping in the daytime he slept. One da Unsho visited Tanzan, who was drinking wine at the time, not even a drop of which is supposed to touch the tongue of a Buddhist. "Hello, brother," Tanzan greeted him. "Won't you have a drink?" "I never drink!" exclaimed Unsho solemnly. "One who never drinks is not even human," said Tanzan. "Do you mean to call me inhuman just because I do not indulge in intoxicating liquids!" exclaimed Unsho in anger. "Then if I am not human, wht am I?" "A Buddha," answered Tanzan.
Nyogen Senzaki