Hataikwan > Hataikwan's Quotes

“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“...nothing could be more pleasant than to live in solitude, enjoy the spectacle of nature, and occasionally read some book...”
― Nickolai Gogol

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own / Three Guineas

“On the contrary, I believe it doesn't make much sense to say that one man is worth more than another. One man can be stronger than another but less wise. Or more educated but not so brave. Or more generous but also more stupid. So his value depends on what you want from him; a man can be very good at his job, and worthless if you set him to do some other job.”
― Primo Levi, If Not Now, When?

“A nihilist is a man who doesn’t acknowledge any authorities, who doesn’t accept a single principle on faith, no matter how much that principle may be surrounded by respect.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses

“I don't deserve this life―I'm better of dead, I'm sorry.”
― Mitch Cullin, From the Place in the Valley Deep in the Forest

“I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“It is my bad luck that this has happened to me.' No, you should rather say: 'It is my good luck that, although this has happened to me, I can bear it without pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearful of the future.' Because such a thing could have happened to any man, but not every man could have borne it without pain. So why see more misfortune in the event than good fortune in your ability to bear it?”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Still, being alone doesn't mean you have to be miserable. In that sense it's different from losing something. You've still got yourself, even if you lose everything else. You've got to have faith in yourself and not get down just because you're on your own.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Diving Pool: Three Novellas

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.”
― Charles Horton Cooley

“She was full of yearning. To leave, to be someone else, somewhere else, to start moving and never stop. And yet the more the innermost part of her screamed to move, the more she recognised that she was frozen to one place, one life.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“We are not disturbed by what happens to us, but by our thoughts about what happens to us.”
― Epictetus

“Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don't want to do?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Strange Library

“The tricky thing about mazes is that you don't know if you've chosen the right path until the very end. If it turns out you were wrong, it's usually too late to go back and start again. That's the problem with mazes.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Strange Library

“Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Black Obelisk

“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY - MAN

“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“Memory's only like justice, because it is another wrong idea that makes people feel right.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“We human beings sometimes steer off in a direction in which we hope to find something a little bit better.”
― Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colors

“Everybody's the same. People are all the same. But it’s the prerogative of youth to think it’s not so.”
― Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colors

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“I am so tired. I feel myself drifting, away, a little by little. I am overcome by the sensation that I am crumbling, parts of my being drifting away.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women

“Why try to be like others if you're condemned to being yourself? Why laugh if, when you laugh, even your genuine happiness is false, since it is born of forgetting who you are? Why cry if you feel it's of no use, and if you cry not because tears console you but because it grieves you that they don't?”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“If I'm not for myself, who will be for me?
If not this way, how? If not now, when?”
― Primo Levi, If Not Now, When?

“The sea of grief has no shores, no bottom; no one can sound its depths.”
― Primo Levi, If Not Now, When?

“Pain is a companion, not a master.”
― Mitch Cullin, From the Place in the Valley Deep in the Forest