63 Quotes by Natsume Sōseki

There was nothing so very unfamiliar about the excitement she was feeling, and yet it felt always like a new excitement. It was, in other words, a perennially unfamiliar feeling.

He framed a question inwardly to his vanity: 'Will this be tougher than I thought?

Use your intellect to guide you, and you will end up putting peopleoff. Rely on your emotions, and you will forever be pushed around.Force your will on others, and you will live in constant tension. Thereis no getting around it—people are hard to live with.

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?

He seemed to become aware of a dark, imponderable force pushing him left when he meant to go right or pulling him back when he meant to go forward. Until that moment, hewould have felt certain that his actions had never been subject to restraintby others. He had been certain that he did whatever he did of his ownaccord, that everything he said he intended to say.

People may make fun of me because I’m wearing something odd, but it’s still good to be alive.

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

He was grand in his convictions. He would stride forward to meet his own destruction.

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.