Natsume 2 Quotes & Sayings

I tried instead to drown my soul in drink. I cannot say I like alcohol, but I am someone who can drink if I choose to, and I set about obliterating my heart by drinking all I could. This was a puerile way out, of course, and it very quickly led to an even greater despair with the world. In the midst of a drunken stupor, I would come to my senses and realize what an idiot I was to try to fool myself like this. Then my vision and understanding grew clear, and I sat shivering and sober. There were desolate times when even the poor disguise of drunkenness failed to work, no matter how I drank. And each time I sought pleasure in drink, I emerged more depressed than ever. — Soseki Natsume

The autumn leaves, arranged in two or three scarlet terraces among the pine-trees, have fallen like ancient dreams. — Soseki Natsume

Secretiveness is a most mysterious matter. However well one guards a secret, sooner or later it's bound to come out. — Soseki Natsume

If whiskers establish sauciness, every cat is impudent. — Soseki Natsume

This reticence has little to do with trying to protect oneself and everything to do with trying to protect others from one's problems, which shouldn't be theirs; it's one reason Japan is so confounding to foreigners, as its people faultlessly sparkle and attend to one another in in public, while often seeming passive and unconvinced of their ability to do anything decisive at home. — Pico Iyer

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

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

You must not speak ill of other persons. After all, everyone dies when their allotted span is over. — Soseki Natsume

Why haven't you changed?' and she said, 'Because the year I had this face, the month I wore these clothes, and the day I had my hair like this is my favourite time of all.' 'What time is that?' I asked her. 'The day we met twenty years ago,' she said. I wondered to myself, 'Then why have I aged like this?' and she told me, 'Because you wanted to go on changing, moving towards something more and more beautiful. — Soseki Natsume

To be as comfortably off as you are is, after all, the best way to be. — Soseki Natsume

It is of course true that the human creature characteristically prides itself on its self-reliance. However, it would be more exact to say that the creature, knowing it can't rely upon itself, would very much like to believe that it could and is consequently never at ease with itself until it can give a practical demonstration to some other such creature of how much it can rely upon itself. — Soseki Natsume

(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

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

The artist, even when he imitates nature, always feels himself to be not a slave but a demigod. — Soseki Natsume

Reflection may be essential to a scholar, but it's taboo in social intercourse. — Soseki Natsume

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

The poet has an obligation to dissect his own corpse and reveal the symptoms of its illness to the world. — Soseki Natsume

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? Perhaps - but this was still not quite it. Eventually, I began to wonder whether it was not the same unbearable loneliness that I now felt that had brought K to his decision. — Soseki Natsume

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 writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don't know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel. Real people are strangely difficult to make sense out of. Even a god would have his hands full trying. — Soseki Natsume

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

How deep, how recondite this seeming petty heart,
In whose recesses right and wrong lie dimmed by distance. — Soseki Natsume

here was no way of knowing what path he would take from there, but in order to survive as a human being, he was sure to arrive at the fate of having to incur the dislike of other human beings. When that time came, he would probably clothe himself inconspicuously, so as not to attract attention, and beggarlike, linger about the market places of man, in search of something. — Soseki Natsume

Where joy grows deep, sorrow must deepen; the greater one's pleasures, the greater the pain. — Soseki Natsume

The plain fact is that humans, one and all, are merely thieves at heart. — Soseki Natsume

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

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

To be able to muster so many complaints about one little thing - yes, you'll get ahead, that's for sure. — Soseki Natsume

There you are. It's what I've been saying all along. You have too much latitude. And that makes you extravagant. The result is, the minute you acquire something you like, you want the next thing. But when something you like gets away, you stamp your feet in chagrin."

"When have I ever behaved that way?"

"Believe me, you have. You're behaving that way now. It's the price you pay for your latitude. And it's what gives me the keenest pleasure. It's the Karma principle, poverty taking its revenge on affluence. — Soseki Natsume

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 worthwhile. They get an education that's stripped to the bare bone, and they're driven with their noses to the grindstone until they're dizzy -- that's why they all end up with nervous breakdowns. Try talking to them -- they're usually stupid. They haven't thought about a thing beyond themselves, that day, that very instant. They're too exhausted to think about anything else; it's not their fault. Unfortunately, exhaustion of the spirit and deterioration of the body come hand-in-hand. And that's not all. The decline of morality has set in too. Look where you will in this country, you won't find one square inch of brightness. It's all pitch black. So what difference would it make... — Soseki Natsume

Men works by preference, not by logic. — Soseki Natsume