Natsume Soseki

“Cuando aceptas una invitación, lo que haces en realidad es decirle a la otra persona que le tienes respeto y la aprecias... Quien acepta la invitación puede ser un don nadie, pero eso da igual. Basta con que sea un ser humano libre e independiente. El hecho de que ese hombre independiente te encuentre digno de respeto y aprecio es más valioso que un millón de yenes.”

“إن جوهر التعليم لا يقتصر على نقل المعرفة والمعلومات، بل يكمن أيضاً في التنشئة على قيم النبل والاستقامة والرجولة، ما يتطلب بنظري استئصال الخصال غير المستحبة كالبذاءة والسطحية والغطرسة.”

“From then on, my thesis hung over me like a curse, and with bloodshot eyes, I worked like a madman.”

“I am a lonely man,' Sensei said. 'And so I am glad that you come to see me. But I am also a melancholy man, and so I asked you why you should wish to visit me so often.”

“It is not you in particular that I distrust, but the whole of humanity.”

“Ako ja, ma kako se na to gledalo, sa svog licnog gledista bacim, razdvojivsi samoga sebe, pogled na onog mladog covjeka kakav sam tada bio, treba da se zalim, sto me sudbina nije rodila pomalo niktovom, i ne mogu se utjesiti zbog svog prevelikog postenja. Ne bih li ja, naprotiv, sve bio dao, da u sebi izbrisem svako iskustvo, da opet imam svoju djetinju dusu i da s njome zivim u cistoci? To moje JA, sto ga svi poznajete, ne zaboravite, to je uprljano svom necistocom zivota. Ako je istina, da covjek moze izvuci neki ponos iz hrpe onih godina koje je prozivio u necistoci, tad me, pristajem, nazovite svojim starijim bratom.”

“One may be branded foolishly honest if he takes seriously the apologies others might offer. We should regard all apologies a sham and forgiving also as a sham; then everything would be all right. If one wants to make another apologize from his heart, he has to pound him good and strong until he begs for mercy from his heart”

“Soy un gato, un ser extremadamente sensible a los más sutiles cambios en la mente o el alma del mundo. Y, naturalmente, necesito dormir más que el resto.”

“Ketika manusia bebas memutuskan untuk menghormatimu, hadiah yang kaumiliki lebih mahal nilainya daripada apapun.”

“Hanya karena seseorang pandai berargumen, tidak berarti orang itu orang baik. Sama halnya seseorang yang dikalahkan dalam argumen adalah orang jahat.”

“Kalau kau bisa membeli kekaguman seseorang dengan uang, kekuasaan, atau logika, maka lintah darat, polisi, dan profesor universitas akan memiliki lebih banyak pengagum daripada siapa pun.”

“Over the wintry forest, winds howl in rage with no leaves to blow.”

“Living as I do with human beings, the more that I observe them, the more I am forced to conclude that they are selfish.”

“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 egoistical selves.”

“Yo no sé por qué razón la Tierra gira alrededor de su eje, pero lo que es seguro es que el dinero contante y sonante es la motivación de todas las cosas.”

“He saw the human shadows flitting through his second world. Most of them had unkempt beards. Some walked along looking at the sky, others at the ground. All wore shabby clothing. All lived in poverty. And all were serene. Closed in on every side by streetcars, they freely breathed the air of peace. The men in this world were unfortunate, for they knew nothing of the real world. But they were fortunate as well, for they had fled the Burning House of worldly suffering. Professor Hirota was in this second world. So, too, was Nonomiya. Sanshiro stood where he could understand the air of this world more or less. He could leave it whenever he wished. But to do so, to relinquish a taste he had finally begun to savor, was something he was loath to do.”

“Lo que uno hace una vez, quiere hacerlo de nuevo, y las cosas que se han probado dos veces, exigen una tercera.”

“Es una de esas fisonomías que se quedaron sin vender en el siglo XIX y que en el XX siguen sin encontrar postor.”

“It is painfully easy to define human beings. They are beings who, for no good reason at all, create their own unnecessary suffering.”

“Pero les juro que los humanos no se saldrán con la suya eternamente. Tenemos que ser pacientes. Llegará un día, y espero que no tarde mucho, en que los gatos dominaremos el mundo.”

“Vaya, pues sí que viven bien los maestros. Si fuera humano me gustaría ser como él, maestro de escuela. Uno puede dormirse cuando quiere y, aun así, siguen considerándote un buen maestro. Así que no le veo yo problema a ser maestro y gato a la vez.”

“I do not want your admiration now, because I do not want your insults in the future. I bear with my loneliness now, in order to avoid greater loneliness in the years ahead. 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.”

“El que cambia su opinión demuestra con ello que su mente no es de piedra.”

“Now that I thought about it, though, I realized that most people actually encourage you to turn bad. They seem to think that if you don't, you'll never get anywhere in the world. And then on those rare occasions when they encounter somebody who's honest and pure-hearted, they look down on him and say he's nothing but a kid, a Botchan. If that's the way it is, it would be better if they didn't have those ethics classes in elementary school and middle school where the teacher is always telling you to be honest and not lie. The schools might as well just go ahead and teach you how to tell lies, how to mistrust everybody, and how to take advantage of people. Wouldn't their students, and the world at large, be better off that way? Redshirt had laughed at me for being simpleminded. If people are going to get laughed at for being simpleminded and sincere, there's no hope. Kiyo never laughed at me for saying anything like what I said to Redshirt. She would have been deeply impressed by it. Compared to Redshirt, she's far and away the superior person.”

“His grin seemed to say, “It is, for some strange reason, considered proper to congratulate people on such occasions as this.”

“- ¿De verdad conoció a Masaoka?- Nunca nos conocimos personalmente, pero mantuvimos una estrecha y fructífera relación telepática.”

“I am a lonely man," he said again that evening. "And is it not possible that you are also a lonely person? But I am an older man, and I can live with my loneliness, quietly. You are young, and it must be difficult to accept your loneliness. You must sometimes want to fight it.""But I am not at all lonely.""Youth is the loneliest time of all. Otherwise, why should you come so often to my house?"Sensei continued: "But surely, when you are with me, you cannot rid yourself of your loneliness. I have not it in me to help you forget it. You will have to look elsewhere for the consolation you seek. And soon, you will find that you no longer want to visit me."As he said this, Sensei smiled sadly.”

“No matter how fierce was the passion that gripped him, the fact is he was paralyzed, transfixed by the contemplation of his own past. Only something so momentous as to drive from his consciousness all thoughts of before and after could have propelled him forward. And with his eyes fixed on the past, he had no choice but to continue along its trajectory.”

“He was grand in his convictions. He would stride forward to meet his own destruction.”

“[T]he very color of the air in the place I was born was different, the smell of the earth was special, redolent with memories of my parents.”

“Use your intellect to guide you, and you will end up putting peopleoff. Rely on your emotions, and you will forever be pushed around.Force your will on others, and you will live in constant tension. Thereis no getting around it—people are hard to live with.”

“On the whole, all people are good, or at least they're normal. The frightening thing is that they can suddenly turn bad when it comes to the crunch.”

“Being a man, I may fall passionately in love with a woman someday, but I positively assert that if I had to get involved in a rivalry as intense as the love itself in order to win the object of love, I would sooner give her up by standing aloof with my hands in my pockets, no matter what pain or sacrifice I might have to endure. Others may criticize me as unmanly, cowardly, weak-willed, or whatever. But if the woman is one so wavering between her suitors that she can only be won through that kind of painful competition, I can't regard her as worth the bitter rivalry. It's far more satisfying to my conscience to have the manliness to allow my rival free play in the field of love and for me to gaze in loneliness at the scars of love than to have the pleasure of embracing by force a woman who would not willingly give me her heart.”

“The average novel invariably reads like a detective's report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective.”

“Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head.”

“To tell you the truth, I used to consider it a disgrace to be found ignorant by other people. But now, I find that I am not ashamed of knowing less than others, and I'm less inclined to force myself to read books. In short, I have grown old and decrepit.”

“Sometimes when I can no longer endure the strain, I beg him to tell me what is wrong with me and help me to correct it. Then he always says that I have nothing to correct, assuring me that it is he who is at fault. And I become sadder and sadder until I weep with the desire to know my fault.”

“I often laughed, and you often gave me a dissatisfied look, till you pressed me to unfold my past before you as if it were a roll of pictures. It was then I felt respect for you. Because you unreservedly showed me your resolution to catch something alive in my being, and to sip the warm blood running in my body, by cutting my heart. At that time, I was still living, and did not want to die. So I rejected your request, promising to satisfy you some day. Now I am going to destroy my heart myself, and pour my blood into your veins. I shall be happy if a new life can enter into your bosom, when my heart has stopped beating.”

“Like the first whiff of burning incense, or like the taste of one's first cup of saké, there is in love that moment when all its power is felt.”

“If the Creator should take the line that I am born to work and not to sleep, I would agree that I am indeed born to work but I would also make the unanswerable point that I cannot work unless I also rest.”

“You seem to be under the impression that there is a special breed of bad humans. There is no such thing as a stereotype bad man in this world. Under normal conditions, everybody is more or less good, or, at least, ordinary. But tempt them, and they may suddenly change. That is what is so frightening about men.”

“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.”

“He is totally abandoned in the way he buys book after book, never to read a single one. I wouldn't mind if he used his head and bought in moderation, but no. Whenever the mood takes him, he ambles off to the biggest bookshop in the city and brings back home as many books as chance to catch his fancy. Then, at the end of the month, he adopts an attitude of complete detachment.”

“Watch birth and death:The lotus has alreadyOpened its flower.”

“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.”