56 Quotes by Sōseki Natsume

Nobody can be angry and write a Hokku at the same time. Likewise, if you are crying, express your tears in seventeen syllables and you feel happy. No sooner are your thoughts down on paper, than all connection between you and the pain which caused you to cry is severed, and your only feeling is one of happiness that you are a man capable of shedding tears.

But facts, remembered or not, are all, alas, still facts

Tokyo is bigger than Kumamoto. And Japan is bigger than Tokyo. And even bigger than Japan... Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don't ever surrender yourself ― not to Japan, not to anything. You may think that what you're doing is for the sake of the nation, but let something take possession of you like that, and all you do is bring it down.

(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.

Đây là một bức thư quan trọng nên cháu phải mở nó ra, để nó bay bay trong gió và đọc một phần trước, sau đó lại cho nó bay bay thêm lần nữa rồi mới đọc tiếp phần còn lại.

You have a fine scholar's way with words, I must say. You're good at empty reasoning.

To get a genuine apology from somebody, you're going to have to keep beating them until their regret is genuine too.

But to my questions he gave replies so vague that one could not tell whether they came from the mountains or the sea.

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