Kokoro
Natsume Sōseki
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I do not want your admiration now, because I do not want your insults in the future. I bear with my loneliness now, in order to avoid greater loneliness in the years ahead. You see, loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egotistical selves.”
“It is not you in particular that I distrust, but the whole of humanity.”
“...you don't really become a finer person just by reading lots of books.”
“I am a lonely man," he said again that evening. "And is it not possible that you are also a lonely person? But I am an older man, and I can live with my loneliness, quietly. You are young, and it must be difficult to accept your loneliness. You must sometimes want to fight it." "But I am not at all lonely." "Youth is the loneliest time of all. Otherwise, why should you come so often to my house?" Sensei continued: "But surely, when you are with me, you cannot rid yourself of your loneliness. I have not it in me to help you forget it. You will have to look elsewhere for the consolation you seek. And soon, you will find that you no longer want to visit me." As he said this, Sensei smiled sadly.”
“On the whole, all people are good, or at least they're normal. The frightening thing is that they can suddenly turn bad when it comes to the crunch.”
“I am a lonely man,' Sensei said. 'And so I am glad that you come to see me. But I am also a melancholy man, and so I asked you why you should wish to visit me so often.”
“No matter how fierce was the passion that gripped him, the fact is he was paralyzed, transfixed by the contemplation of his own past. Only something so momentous as to drive from his consciousness all thoughts of before and after could have propelled him forward. And with his eyes fixed on the past, he had no choice but to continue along its trajectory.”
“From then on, my thesis hung over me like a curse, and with bloodshot eyes, I worked like a madman.”
“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.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
japanese-literature, life-lesson, loneliness, japanese, studying, human-nature, japan, nostalgia, aging
