Kokoro

by Natsume Sōseki

From this point on, Sensei and I were friends.

For all his unresponsiveness to others’ affection, I now see, it was not them he despised but himself.

“I have only ever known one woman in my life. No one besides my wife has really ever appealed to me as a woman. And likewise for her, I am the only man. Given this, we should be the happiest of couples.”

You’re driven by the feeling that if only you could find that object, you’d be at peace.” “I don’t feel too restless right now.”

“I don’t even trust myself. It’s because I can’t trust myself that I can’t trust others. I can only curse myself for it.”

“The memory of having sat at someone’s feet will later make you want to trample him underfoot. I’m trying to fend off your admiration for me, you see, in order to save myself from your future contempt. I prefer to put up with my present state of loneliness rather than suffer more loneliness later. We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It’s the price we pay for these times of ours.”

I’m always amazed at how men can go on and on, happily passing around the empty cup of some futile discussion.”

I suppose it’s because I believe you don’t really become a finer person just by reading lots of books.

“Money, my friend. The most moral of men will turn bad when they see money.”

Words are not just vibrations in the air, they work more powerfully than that, and on more powerful objects.

When it comes down to it, I told myself, she’s acting this way because she’s a woman, and women are stupid.

I felt for her a love that was close to pious faith.

but real love, I firmly believe, is not so different from the religious impulse.

Being human, of course, I could not leave my fleshly self behind, yet the eyes that beheld her, the heart that treasured thoughts of her, knew nothing of the reek of the physical.

All our capacities, both physical and mental, require external stimuli for both their development and their destruction, and in either case these stimuli must be increased by slow degrees in order to be effective. But this gradual increase creates a very real danger that not only you yourself but those around you may fail to notice any problems that might develop.

My eyes, my heart, my body, every atom of my being, was focused on him with unwavering intent.

K had always loved the expression “spiritual austerity,” which I understood to contain the idea of control over the passions.

No matter how fierce was the passion that gripped him, the fact is he was paralyzed, transfixed by the contemplation of his own past.

And with his eyes fixed on the past, he had no choice but to continue along its trajectory.

Sadly, however, I was blinded by my own single-minded preoccupation.

had had no thought of tears until that moment, but now at last I was able to let a sensation of sorrow pervade me. Words cannot express what a comfort that was.

This very happiness, it seemed to me, could well be a fuse that drew the flame of my life toward a bitter fate.