You’re not human. You’re a being who is incapable of social intercourse. You’re nothing but a creature, non-human and somehow strangely pathetic.
We all know that the world is empty and that the important thing, the only thing, is to try to maintain order in that emptiness.
True pain can only come gradually. It is exactly like tuberculosis in that the disease has already progressed to a critical stage before the patient becomes aware of its symptoms.
It seemed that hell could appear day or night, at any time, at any place, simply in response to one’s thoughts or wishes. It seemed that we could summon it at our pleasure and that instantly it would appear.
She did not know it, but she was actually in despair at the poverty of human emotions. Was it not irrational that there was nothing to do except weep when ten people died, just as one wept for but a single person?
One could certainly think of a man not in terms of a body but as a single vital current. And this would allow one to grasp the concept of existence as dynamic and on-going, rather than as static.
Oddly enough, living only for one’s emotions, like a flag obedient to the breeze, demands a way of life that makes one balk at the natural course of events, for this implies being altogether subservient to nature. The life of the emotions detests all constraints, whatever their origin, and thus, ironically enough, is apt eventually to fetter its own instinctive sense of freedom.
The process in which a writer is compelled to counterfeit his true feelings is exactly the opposite of that which the man of society is compelled to counterfeit his. The artist disguises in order to reveal; the man of society disguises in order to conceal.
He was always thinking of death, and this had so refined him that the physical seemed to fall away, freeing him from the pull of earth and enabling him to walk about some distance above its surface. Indeed he felt that even his distaste and hatred for the affairs of the world no longer stirred him deeply.
Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.
Most people are always doubtful as to whether they are happy or not, cheerful or not. This is the normal state of happiness, as doubt is a most natural thing.
With a heart unaccustomed to doubting, he never wondered for an instant whether the girl would brave such a storm to keep their rendezvous. He knew nothing of that melancholy and all-too-effective way of passing time by magnifying and complicating his feelings, whether of happiness or uneasiness, through the exercise of imagination.
We human beings sometimes steer off in a direction in which we hope to find something a little bit better.
His occupation gave me the feeling of “tragedy” in the most sensuous meaning of the word. A certain feeling as it were of “self-renunciation,” a certain feeling of indifference, a certain feeling of intimacy with danger, a feeling like a remarkable mixture of nothingness and vital power – all these feelings swarmed forth from his calling, bore down upon me, and took me captive, at the age of four.
You were so beautiful when you wanted to die. When you wanted to live, you became so ugly.
Only knowledge can turn life’s unbearableness into a weapon.
And one clouded stream that never ran dry was that choked with the scum of humanism, the poison spewed out by the factory at its headwaters. There it was: its lights burning brilliantly as it worked even through the night – the factory of Western European ideals. The pollution from that factory degraded the exalted fervor to kill; it withered the green of the sakaki’s leaves.
But there is no such thing as individual knowledge, a particular knowledge belonging to one special person or group. Knowledge is the sea of humanity, the field of humanity, the general condition of human existence.
By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive the Truth. And first we must know that each of the petals has eighty-four thousand veins and that each vein gives eighty-four thousand lights.
For me, beauty is always retreating from one’s grasp: the only thing I consider important is what existed once, or ought to have existed. By its subtle, infinitely varied operation, the steel restored the classical balance that the body had begun to lose, reinstating it in its natural form, the form that it should have had all along.