Muso Soseki Quotes

It would be merciful for people not to come calling and disturb the loneliness of the mountains to which I have returned from the sorrows of the world. ~ Muso Soseki

When it's cold, water freezes into ice; when it's warm, ice melts into water. Similarly, when you are confused, essence freezes into mind; when you are enlightened, mind melts into essence. ~ Muso Soseki

Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on. These ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

When there is no place that you have decided to call your own, then no matter where you go, you are always heading home. ~ Muso Soseki

Those who seek liberation for themselves alone cannot become fully enlightened. Though it may be said that one who is not already liberated cannot liberate others, the very process of forgetting oneself to help others is in itself liberating ~ Muso Soseki

Old age and death are in the natural course of things. There is nothing a doctor can do about them. ~ Muso Soseki

It is better to practice a little than talk a lot. ~ Muso Soseki

My thatched hut;
the whole sky Is its roof
The mountains are its hedge,
And it has the sea for a garden.
I'm inside with nothing at all,
Not even a bag,
And yet there are visitors who say "
It's hidden behind a bamboo door"
- Muso Soseki ~ Muso Soseki

When a garden is used as a place to pause for thought, that is when a Zen garden comes to life. When you contemplate a garden like this it will form as lasting impression on your heart. ~ Muso Soseki

In Doya-sensei's view the world was a place to work for the sake of others; in Takayanagi's view the world was a place to work for his own sake. In a world where he lived for others, Doya felt no regret that no one offered a helping hand. In a world where he lived for himself, Takayanagi felt the world that cared nothing for him was cruel.

Such is the difference between one who exists for others and one who exists for himself. Such is the difference between one who leads others and one who relies on others. Such is the difference, even when both are solitary individuals. Takayanagi was not aware of these differences. ~ Soseki Natsume

Some say that life has no form, that it is extremely diffuse. I think I can agree with them ... A life without conclusions is painful. ~ Soseki Natsume

Our hearts parted a long time ago, and I was wrong to think they could be brought together again. ~ Soseki Natsume

But once I could look back on it in a calmer frame of mind, it struck me that his motive was surely not so simple and straightforward. Had it resulted from a fatal collision between reality and ideals? Perhaps - but this was still not quite it. Eventually, I began to wonder whether it was not the same unbearable loneliness that I now felt that had brought K to his decision. ~ Soseki Natsume

I don't like argumentation. You men do it a lot, don't you? You seem to enjoy it. I'm always amazed at how men can go on and on, happily passing around the empty cup of some futile discussion ~ Soseki Natsume

Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. ~ Soseki Natsume

There in the mountains, close to the delights of Nature, everything you see and hear is a joy. It is a joy unspoiled by any real discomfort. Your legs may possibly ache, or you may feel the lack of something really good to eat, but that is all. I wonder why this should be? I suppose the reason is that, looking at the landscape, it is as though you were looking at a picture unrolled before you, or reading a poem on a scroll. The whole area is yours [...]. You are free from any care or worry because you accept the fact that this scenery will help neither to fill your belly, nor add a penny to your salary, and are content to enjoy it just as scenery. This is the great charm of Nature, that it can in an instant discipline men's hearts and minds, and removing all that is base, lead them into the pure unsullied world of poetry. ~ Soseki Natsume

Just as you can only really smell incense in the first moments after it is lit, or taste wine in that instant of the first sip, the impulse of love springs from a single, perilous moment in time, I feel. ~ Soseki Natsume

When he heard that Sanshiro was going to school forty hours a week, his eyes popped. "You idiot! Do you think it would 'satisfy' you to eat what they serve at your rooming house ten times a day?"
"What should I do?" Sanshiro pleaded.
"Ride the streetcar," Yojiro said.
Sanshiro tried to find Yojiro's hidden meaning, without success.
"You mean a real streetcar?" he asked.
Yojiro laughed uncontrollably. "Get on the streetcar and ride around Tokyo ten or fifteen times. After a while it will just happen by itself- you will become satisfied.
"Why?"
"Why? Well, look at it this way. Your head is alive, but if you seal it up inside dead classes, you're lost. Take it outside and get the wind into it. Riding the streetcar is not the only way to get satisfaction, of course, but it's the first step, and the easiest. ~ Soseki Natsume

I am not as hard as I seem. For the right person, I too could shed a few tears. ~ Soseki Natsume

Even the works of Shakespeare might be more thoroughly appreciated if they were re-examined from unorthodox positions. Someone, once in a while, should take a good long look at Hamlet through his legs. ~ Soseki Natsume

Knowing that it is the earth we tread, we learn to tread carefully, lest it be rent open. Realizing that it is the heavens that hang above us, we come to fear the echoing thunderbolt. The world demands that we battle with others for the sake of our own reputation, and so we undergo the sufferings bred of illusion. While we live in this world with its daily business, forced to walk the tightrope of profit and loss, true love is an empty thing, and the wealth before our eyes mere dust. ~ Soseki Natsume

He seemed to become aware of a dark, imponderable force pushing him left when he meant to go right or pulling him back when he meant to go forward. Until that moment, he
would have felt certain that his actions had never been subject to restraint
by others. He had been certain that he did whatever he did of his own
accord, that everything he said he intended to say. ~ Soseki Natsume

Nobody can be angry and write a Hokku at the same time. Likewise, if you are crying, express your tears in seventeen syllables and you feel happy. No sooner are your thoughts down on paper, than all connection between you and the pain which caused you to cry is severed, and your only feeling is one of happiness that you are a man capable of shedding tears. ~ Soseki Natsume

If whiskers establish sauciness, every cat is impudent. ~ Soseki Natsume

People really didn't change very much, he thought; they only decayed. ~ Soseki Natsume

Daisuke was of course equipped with conversation that, even if they went further, would allow him to retreat as if nothing had happened. He had always wondered at the conversations recorded in Western novels, for to him they were too bald, too self indulgent, and moreover, too unsubtly rich. However they read in the original, he thought they reflected a taste that could not be translated into Japanese. Therefore, he had not the slightest intention of using imported phrases to develop his relationship with Michiyo. Between the two of them at least, ordinary words sufficed perfectly well. But the danger was of slipping from point A to point B without realizing it. Daisuke managed to stand his ground only by a hair's breadth. When he left, Michiyo saw him to the entranceway and said, "Do come again, please? It's so lonely. ~ Soseki Natsume

An artist is a person who lives in the triangle which remains after the angle which we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world. ~ Soseki Natsume

That K was hesitant in love does not mean that his love was in any sense lukewarm. He was unable to move, despite the violence of his emotion. And since the impact of his new emotion was not so great as to allow him to forget himself, he was forced to look back and remind himself of what his past had meant. And in doing so he could not but continue along the path that he had so far followed. ~ Soseki Natsume

There, sitting cross-legged on the floor, he stared absently at his legs. They began to look strange. They no longer seemed to grow from his trunk at all, but rather, completely unconnected, they sprawled rudely before him. When he got this far, he realized something he had never noticed before - that his legs were unbearably hideous. With hair growing unevenly and blue streaks running rampant, they were terribly strange creatures. ~ Soseki Natsume

Secretiveness is a most mysterious matter. However well one guards a secret, sooner or later it's bound to come out. ~ Soseki Natsume

But to my questions he gave replies so vague that one could not tell whether they came from the mountains or the sea. ~ Soseki Natsume

I thought of the new stone, of my new wife, and of the newly buried white bones beneath us, and I felt that fate had made sport of us all. ~ Soseki Natsume

On my arrival at Tokyo, I
rushed into her house swinging my valise, before going to a
hotel, with "Hello, Kiyo, I'm back!"
"How good of you to return so soon!" she cried and hot tears
streamed down her cheeks. I was overjoyed, and declared that
I would not go to the country any more but would start housekeeping
with Kiyo in Tokyo.
Some time afterward, some one helped me to a job as assistant
engineer at the tram car office. The salary was 25 yen a
month, and the house rent six. Although the house had not a
magnificent front entrance, Kiyo seemed quite satisfied, but, I
am sorry to say, she was a victim of pneumonia and died in
February this year. On the day preceding her death, she asked
me to bedside, and said, "Please, Master Darling, if Kiyo is
dead, bury me in the temple yard of Master Darling. I will be
glad to wait in the grave for my Master Darling."
So Kiyo's grave is in the Yogen temple at Kobinata. ~ Natsume Sōseki

Thus, as I review the list of my friends and acquaintances, most of them emerge as stained with maniac stigmata of one sort or another. I begin to feel considerably reassured. The truth may simply be that human society is no more than a massing of lunatics. ~ Soseki Natsume

London is a city that offers all kinds of temptations, and whenever I go for a walk I discover things that I would like to bring back as souvenirs. But my resources are very limited. I cannot buy anything, and I make a point of taking my walks a good distance from these riches. ~ Soseki Natsume

Admittedly, there's a certain coarseness about [businessmen]; for there's no point in even trying to be [one] unless your love for money is so absolute that you're ready to accompany it on the walk to a double suicide. For money, believe you me, is a hard mistress, and none of her lovers are let off lightly. As a matter of fact, I've just been visiting a businessman and, according to him, the only way to succeed is to practice the "triangled" technique: try to escape your obligations, annihilate your kindly feelings, and geld yourself of the sense of shame. ~ Soseki Natsume

It would seem that for my master a book is not a thing to be read, but a device to bring on slumber: a typographical sleeping-pill, a paginated security blanket. ~ Soseki Natsume

What this feeling produced was, quite simply, a keen awareness of the nature of human sin. That is what sent me back each month to K's grave. It is also what lay behind the nursing of my dying mother-in-law, and what bade me treat my wife so tenderly. There were even times when I longed for some stranger to come along and flog me as I deserved. At some stage this feeling transformed into a conviction that it should be I who hurt myself. And then the thought struck me that I should not just hurt myself but kill myself. At all events, I resolved that I must live my life as if I were already dead. ~ Soseki Natsume

I am grabbed by the scruff of the neck and pitched clean out of the room. It seems that this sudden aversion stems from human disgust with those barely visible and totally insignificant insects which I harbor. A heartless and most callous attitude! How can such inconsiderate behavior possibly be justified by the presence in my coat of one or two thousand footling fleas? The answer is, of course, that Article One of those Laws of Love (by which all humans creatures regulate their lives) specifically enjoins that «ye shall love one another for so long as it serves thine individual interest.» ~ Natsume Sōseki

Knowing that it is the earth that we tread, we learn to tread carefully, lest it be rent open. Realizing that it is the heavens that hang above us, we come to fear the echoing thunderbolt. The world demands that we battle with others for the sake of our own reputation, and so we undergo the sufferings bred of illusion. While we live in this world with its daily business, forced to walk the tightrope of profit and loss, true love is an empty thing, and the wealth before our eyes mere dust. The reputation we grasp at, the glory that we seize, is surely like the honey that the cunning bee will seem sweetly to brew only to leave his sting within it as he flies. What we call pleasure in fact contains all suffering, since it arises from attachment. Only thanks to the existence of the poet and the painter are we able to imbibe the essence of this dualistic world, to taste the purity of its very bones and marrow. ~ Soseki Natsume

I felt for her a love that was close to pious faith. You may find it odd that I use a specifically religious word to describe my feelings for a young woman, but real love, I firmly believe, is not so different from the religious impulse. Whenever I saw her face, I felt that I myself had become beautiful. ~ Soseki Natsume

He framed a question inwardly to his vanity: 'Will this be tougher than I thought? ~ Soseki Natsume