Kusamakura quotes

Climbing the mountain, I was caught up into a train of thought.

Work with your brains, and you are liable to be harsh. Punt in the stream of sentiment, and you may be carried away. Pride stiffens you to discomfort.

Heigh-ho, this is a disagreeable world to live in. When the disagreeableness deepens, you wish to move to a world where life is less uneasy.

Work with your brains, and you are liable to be harsh. Punt in the stream of sentiment, and you may be carried away. Pride stiffens you to discomfort.

Heigh-ho, this is a disagreeable world to live in.

When the disagreeableness deepens, you wish to move to a world where life is less uneasy. It is precisely when you awake to the truth, that move where you will, it will be hard to live, that poetry is born and art creates.

When the disagreeableness deepens, you wish to move to a world where life is less uneasy. It is precisely when you awake to the truth, that move where you will, it will be hard to live, that poetry is born and art creates.

This human world of ours is the making neither of God nor of the Devil; but of common mortals; your neighbors on your right; your neighbors on your left, and your neighbors across the street.

Hate you may this world of common mortals, but where else can you go? If anywhere else, it must be an unhuman world, but you will find an unhuman world a worse place to live in than this of humanity.

When full of joys sorrows are as deep, and the more pain the greater pleasure. Cut sorrows asunder from joys and I won’t be able to get along. Shall I fling them away? that will make an end of the world.

Money is precious; but anxiety will eat you up, even in sleep, when it accumulates.

Love is sweet; but you will yearn after the days when you knew it not, so soon as its very sweetness begins to weigh heavy on you.

Cut sorrows asunder from joys and I won’t be able to get along. Shall I fling them away? that will make an end of the world. Money is precious; but anxiety will eat you up, even in sleep, when it accumulates.

Love is sweet; but you will yearn after the days when you knew it not, so soon as its very sweetness begins to weigh heavy on you.

The shoulders of His Majesty’s Ministers are supporting the feet of millions and the whole country is weighing heavily on their backs. You miss nice things when you part with them without tasting;

But they come back to themselves, when they see a distant field waving with a golden sea of flowers, such as I was looking down upon in the valley. And they may locate their souls when they hear the lark.

The lark does not sing with his throat; but it is his whole soul that sings.

Of all creatures, of which you hear their soul’s activity in their songs, none is as lively as the lark. It was, indeed, joy itself, and as I thus thought, I became joyful, and thus, was Poetry.

It may be, with common mortals, that their sorrows are measured only by the pint not by the bushel. Who can say nay, then, if the poet soars to the height of joys unreachable by his vulgar brothers, he has also unfathomable griefs?

It is perhaps, well, that one thinks twice before one decides to become a poet.

My eyes captivated by the golden rape on the left, a coppice hill on the right and the road under foot running on a smooth level, I stepped now and again on humble dandelions, crushing them, as I thought, under my heels;

but on looking back regretfully, I found the lowly beauty nestling, none the worse, in their double-toothed leaves.

Easy is the life of some of God’s creations.

I continued my climb, returning again to my thoughts of reverie.

In any case, sleep had become impossible, that watch of mine under the pillow ticking me to irrepressible wakefulness.

The tiny ticking of my watch had never before troubled me; but on this particular night it seemed to say “No sleep for you tonight, but think, think, think.”

It was outrageously extraordinary.

That there was no unity in her mind must be the consequence of there being no unity in the world in which she had lived.

Hers was the face of one struggling to overcome the unhappiness that was weighing down upon her. She must be a woman standing under a star of ill-luck.

“Thank you.” Repeating the words, I lightly bowed to her.

Will she be seized by a surprise or by bashfulness? To judge by her looks, I felt sure that embarrassment would be the last thing she would allow to overtake her. I watched her for the moment.

“What a cramped up world! It is all width. You are fond of a place like this? You must be a regular crab.”

Thus she got herself out, and I laughed out aloud:

Some figures—I could not tell what from the distance—adorned the skirt of her dress, and the figured and unfigured parts shaded into each other like day into night.

And the woman was indeed, walking in the borderland of night and day.

What mystified me was what made her go so persistently to and from along the verandah, dressed in her long-sleeved gown. Nor had I any idea of how long she had been at this strange exercise in her strange attire.

Life is easy in this state of existence. You unlock the door of prudence and cast all desires to the Four Winds, and become part of the hot water, leaving it completely to the hot water to make what it likes of you.

The more floating, the less is the pain to live for that which floats.

There will be more blessings than to have become a disciple of Jesus Christ, for one who lets even one’s soul float. At this rate, even drowning is not without its picturesqueness.

They are striving to bring out strongly the fact of being stark-naked, emphasizing the point excessively, indeed, over-excessively beyond fullness. Art carried to this extreme debases itself, in proportion as it coerces one who looks at it.

The beautiful begins, as a rule, to look the less beautiful, the more beautiful it is struggled to make it appear.

This is precisely what, in human affairs, gives life to the proverb, “fullness is the beginning of waning.”

You gaze at Chinese furniture and ornaments. You think they are dull or grotesque; but presently you become conscious that there is in that dullness or grotesqueness something that has a power of fascinating you irresistibly, and that is what makes them precious.

Japan produces her art goods with the attitude of a pickpocket; and the West is large in scale and fine in execution, but inalterably worldly and practical.

A train of thought of some such trend was coursing in me as I sat down, with the youth sharing the rug.

“

If you begin to read from the beginning, you will have to read to the end, don’t you see?

”

“Ho, ho, ho, I will not ask you then.”

“Ordinary novels are all inventions of detectives and denuded of unhumanity they are all so insipid.”

“Good, then, tell me more of unhumanity. What follows next, please?”

“Will it make a good picture?”

“It is a good place for drowning yourself.”

“I have no idea of ending my life in water for some time to come.”

Lucky that I could indulge in a whim like this; for in Tokyo I would be run over by a tram car, if not sternly chased away by a policeman.

Ah! the city is a place where they make a beggar of a peaceful citizen, and pay a high salary to detectives who are all but boss pickpockets!

I sat on a damp cushion, which I found in incipient Spring grass, satisfied that I was in the bosom of nature, where neither wealth nor power could disturb me, and where I could heartily laugh at the folly of Timon’s wrath.

their red is not a common red, but a red with something weird in it like a she-demon in a fair woman’s mask, who fascinates you with her black eyes and beauty and breathes poison into your pores before you know it.

The pear blossoms in rain never fail to arouse a sentiment of pity; the aronia in pale moon light awakens love; but the camellia’s cheerless red bespeaks a dark poison and something ominous.

As I was looking at those dark red flowers, as if under a spell, one of them fell into the water below, absolutely the only thing in motion in the still Spring day. Presently another dropped.

As I was looking at those dark red flowers, as if under a spell, one of them fell into the water below, absolutely the only thing in motion in the still Spring day. Presently another dropped.

The eerie thing about the camellia flower is that it never breaks up when it falls, as do most other flowers, but keeps compactly together, never to let its secret out, as it were.

But one more fell, followed by another, after an interval, by still another, and still another, like the minute gun. Surely, I thought, the whole surface of the pond would turn red, by and by.

I thought and thought and thought, and it suddenly flashed upon me that what was missing from Nami-san was pity and compassion.

Compassion is a feeling unknown to the gods, and yet is one that makes man as near gods as possible.

This was one sentiment which I had never yet seen reflected in Nami-san, and I was convinced that my picture would become an accomplished fact, the moment I saw it aroused by some impulse or other and flashed across her handsome face.

He is enviably content with a production which can hardly be called a picture, and is innocent enough to think that there should be the Doctor of Painting! Nevertheless, he is well-qualified to be an artist.

He is like a bag without a bottom: everything passes through him freely.

No impurities stagnate within him. Only give him a touch of humour, and he shall be at home with everything he comes across, everywhere he goes, and will thus make a perfect artist.

But the iron fence is unbearably galling to all with any sense of individuality, and they are all roaring for liberty, day and night.

Civilization gives men liberty and makes them strong as a tiger. It then entraps and keeps them encaged. It calls this peace.

But this is not a real peace. It is a peace like that of the tiger in the menagerie, which is lying quietly as he looks calmly over the crowd that gathers round his cage.