Kokoro (UNESCO Collection of Representative Works)

by Natsume Sōseki

“Have you ever been in love?” I said no. “Don’t you want to be in love?” I said nothing in reply. “It isn’t that you don’t want to fall in love, is it?” “No.” “You made fun of that couple, didn’t you? But actually, you sounded to me like a person who is dissatisfied because he has not yet been able to fall in love, though he wants to.” “Did I sound like that?” “Yes, you did. A person who has been in love himself

would have been more tolerant and would have felt warmer towards the couple. But—but do you know that there is guilt also in loving? I wonder if you understand me.”

“You are restless because your love has no object. If you could fall in love with some particular person, you wouldn’t be so restless.”

remember, there is guilt in loving. And remember too that in loving there is something sacred.”

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.”

“Let us not argue. You men certainly will argue about anything, and with such obvious pleasure too. I have often wondered how it is that you men can, without becoming bored, forever exchange empty saké cups with one another.”

She valued far more that thing which lies buried in the bottom of one’s heart.

True, being a man, I felt an instinctive yearning for women. But the yearning in me was little more than a vague dream, hardly different from the yearning in one’s heart when one sees a lovely cloud in the spring sky.

At about the time that I began to feel restless at home, my father and mother also began to tire of me. The novelty of having me was wearing off. This kind of situation is probably experienced by most people who return home after a long absence. For the first week or so there is a great deal of fuss, but when the initial excitement is over, one begins to lose one’s popularity. My stay at home had passed the initial stage.

I believe that words uttered in passion contain a greater living truth than do those words which express thoughts rationally conceived. It is blood that moves the body. Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things.

the difference between stubbornness and patience.

when the loftiness is merely in one’s point of view, then one is hopelessly handicapped as a human being.

“Can one expect the complicated mechanism of the human mind to betray its purposes so obviously, as though it were some kind of clock?”

But who are we to judge the needs of another man’s heart?