Quotes by Japanese Authors - Page 43

In my school, no consideration is given to anything unreasonable; the heart of the matter is to use the power of the knowledge of martial arts to gain victory any way you can.
Miyamoto Musashi
There were times he thought it would have been far better to never have known. Yet he continued to return to his core principle: that, in every situation, knowledge was better than ignorance. However agonizing, it was necessary to confront the facts. Only through knowing could a person become strong.
Haruki Murakami
You know what I should do?" Hoshino asked excited. "Of course," the cat said. "What'd I tell you? Cats know everything. Not like dogs.
Haruki Murakami
Everyone lives bound by their own knowledge and awareness. They define that as reality; but knowledge and awareness are vage, and perhaps better called illusions.
Masashi Kishimoto
What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.
Yukio Mishima
I don't subscribe to any religion so it didn't matter to me if I prayed in a shrine, temple, or church. Butbe cause I was asking for so much I assumed Buddha and the Christian God wouldn't even listen
Novala Takemoto
In ancient times people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.
Haruki Murakami
Many Buddhist temple priests regard their parishioners as possessions and fear their departure as a diminishing of assets.
Kentetsu Takamori
Or maybe that’s what it’s all about: this religion’s substance is its lack of substance. In McLuhanesque terms, the medium is the message. Some people might find that cool.”“McLuhanesque?”“Hey, look, even I read a book now and then,” Ayumi protested. “McLuhan was ahead of his time. He was so popular for a while that people tend not to take him seriously, but what he had to say was right.”“In other words, the package itself is the contents. Is that it?”“Exactly. The characteristics of the package determine the nature of the contents, not the other way around.
Haruki Murakami
Bliss and suffering, it seems, always go hand in hand.
Kentetsu Takamori
I dreamt of worldly success once.
Miyamoto Musashi
Modern life seems to recede further and further away from nature, and closely connected with this fact we seem to be losing the feeling of reverence towards nature. It is probably inevitable when science and machinery, capitalism and materialism go hand in hand so far in a most remarkably successful manner. Mysticism, which is the life of religion in whatever sense we understand it, has come to be relegated altogether in the background. Without a certain amount of mysticism there is no appreciation for the feeling of reverence, and, along with it, for the spiritual significance of humility. Science and scientific technique have done a great deal for humanity; but as far as our spiritual welfare is concerned we have not made any advances over that attained by our forefathers. In fact we are suffering at present the worst kind of unrest all over the world.
D.T. Suzuki
What each of us believes in is up to us, but life is impossible without believing in something.
Kentetsu Takamori
No one particular religion has been able to secure the exclusive rights for the power of prayer. No matter who you are, we all have the ability to take advantage of this amazing and wonderful power. Once you realize this, you will then be filled with the desire to help others realize this as well. More and more people are resonating with this understanding, and this could result in a more wonderful future for mankind. (165)
Masaru Emoto
True religion should be able to respond to the dark melodies, the faulty and hideous sounds that echo from the heart of men.
Shūsaku Endō
Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Shino looked at me straight in the eye and smiled, her face brimming with a kind of inner strength. That strength seemed to gather the beads of perspiration that glistened on her brow, then sprang from her face and leapt across to my heart with a rhythm like ripples on water.
Tetsuo Miura
Amida's unimpeded light is the sun of wisdom that destroys the mind of darkness.(Preface in Teaching, Practice, Faith, Enlightenment)
Kentetsu Takamori
No one should ever despair because the entrance to his or her chosen career path is clogged. There is an ancient saying: "The persistent drip wears through stone.
Kentetsu Takamori
Dissatisfaction can be a source of inspiration if you learn to control it.
Tadahiko Nagao
Getting carried away is stupid, it won't get me anywhere.-Nana Komatsu
Ai Yazawa
Once you have met someone, you never really forget them.
Hayao Miyazaki
Writing things was important, wasn't it? Nakata asked.'Yes, it was. The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless.
Haruki Murakami
No, I am not imagining a book-burning, warmongering, anti-intellectual fascist regime – in my plan, there is no place for re ghters who light up the Homers and Lady Murasakis and Cao Xueqins stashed under your bed – because, for starters, I’m not banning literature per se. I’m banning the reading of literature. Purchasing and collecting books and other forms of literature remains perfectly legitimate as long as you don’t peruse the literature at hand.
Kyoko Yoshida
The average novel invariably reads like a detective's report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective.
Sōseki Natsume
I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.The day you die.
Yasunari Kawabata
Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.
Haruki Murakami
I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism.
Haruki Murakami
My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart...
Haruki Murakami
You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.
Haruki Murakami
I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I'm a very realistic person. I don't trust anything New Age -- or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don't trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I'm very realistic. But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird. When I want to write about the reality of society and the world, it gets weird. Many people ask me why, and I can't answer that. But I recognized when I was interviewing those 63 ordinary people -- they were very straightforward, very simple, very ordinary, but their stories were sometimes very weird. That was interesting.
Haruki Murakami
Living like that utterly convinced me of the extreme limitations of language. I was just a child then, so I had only an intuitive understanding of the degree to which one losses control of words once they are spoken or written. It was then that I first felt a deep curiosity about language, and understood it as a tool that encompasses both a single moment and eternity.
Banana Yoshimoto
Over the years I have forged intimate familial ties with these characters, who are reflections of a portion of myself. Consequently, even a character who appeared only once in a short story waits now in the wings, concealed by the curtain, for his next appearance on-stage. Not one of them has ever broken free of his familial ties with me and disappeared for ever - at least, not within the confines of my heart.
Shūsaku Endō
Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.
Haruki Murakami
That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.
Haruki Murakami
I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.
Haruki Murakami
Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.
Haruki Murakami
It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world.
Haruki Murakami
The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky.
Haruki Murakami
If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.
Haruki Murakami
To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.
Akira Kurosawa
Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words...
Yasunari Kawabata
It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.
Haruki Murakami
If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings.
Haruki Murakami
There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.
Haruki Murakami
Lack of wisdom does not make a fool. A fool, in the truest sense, is the man who regards his own misfortunes or those of others as a source of doubt or criticism of the infinite mercy of the Gohonzon.-Josei Toda
Daisaku Ikeda
They tried to believe in their classmates. They must have believed that if we could all get together, then we might end up being saved. We should commend them for that. We couldn't do that.
Koushun Takami
Living in a world such as this is like dancing on a live volcano.
Kentetsu Takamori
Just EnoughSoil for legsAxe for handsFlower for eyesBird for earsMushrooms for noseSmile for mouthSongs for lungsSweat for skinWind for mind
Nanao Sakaki
In those days I used to talk to myself as if reciting poetry.
Haruki Murakami
that stone Buddha deserves all the birdshit it getsI wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind
Ikkyu
I'd love to give you somethingbut what would help?
Ikkyu
Hearing a crow with no mouthCry in the deepDarkness of the night,I feel a longing forMy father before he was born.
Ikkyu
I sing the song of my heartstrings, alone in the eternal muteness, in the face of God.
Yone Noguchi
Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.
Karen Tei Yamashita
it isn't that we're alone or not alonewhose voice do you want mine? yours?
Ikkyu
My house burned downBut anyway, it was afterThe flower petals had already fallen
Tachibana Higuchi
don't wait for the man standing in the snowto cut off his arm help him now
Ikkyu
This dewdrop world Is but a dewdrop worldAnd yet —
Kobayashi Issa
In pale moonlight / the wisteria's scent / comes from far away.
Yosa Buson