Quotes about japanese

His smiling face revealed a love too strong to be kept inside, but the feelings obviously rising inside him kept him from looking directly at Kikunojou. He gazed instead at Kikunojou's clear reflection on the water.

Those who hurt others will also hurt themselves.

If love goes too far, it turns into cruelty.

I like the relaxed way in which the Japanese approach religion. I think of myself as basically a moral person, but I'm definitely not religious, and I'm very tired of the preachiness and obsession with other people's behavior characteristic of many religious people in the United States. As far as I could tell, there's nothing preachy about Buddhism. I was in a lot of temples, and I still don't know what Buddhists believe, except that at one point Kunio said 'If you do bad things, you will be reb

Too lazy to be ambitious,I let the world take care of itself.Ten days' worth of rice in my bag;a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?Listening to the night rain on my roof,I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.

The bond between husband and wife is a strong one. Suppose the man had hunted her out and brought her back. The memory of her acts would still be there, and inevitably, sooner or later, it would be cause for rancor. When there are crises, incidents, a woman should try to overlook them, for better or for worse, and make the bond into something durable. The wounds will remain, with the woman and with the man, when there are crises such as I have described. It is very foolish for a woman to let a l

To be pleasant, gentle, calm and self-possessed: this is the basis of good taste and charm in a woman. No matter how amorous or passionate you may be, as long as you are straightforward and refrain from causing others embarrassment, no one will mind. But women who are too vain and act pretentiously, to the extent that they make others feel uncomfortable, will themselves become the object of attention; and once that happens, people will find fault with whatever they say or do; whether it be how

For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible.

I really hope that the Japanese are going to stop demonstrating to the world what man-made radiation does to people.

Read Hearn, the most eloquent and truthful interpreter of the Japanese mind, and you see the working of that mind to be an example of the working of Bushido.

No, I don't want your money. The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you. I don't like to owe anybody anything, so I keep to myself as much on the lending side as I can.

The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.

You know Americans...Self-improvement. No matter who or what we are, we're always working on ways to become somebody else.

What I always say is that Japanese are like willow. We can be bent easily, but once you try to break us, it would not be so easy.

Within two or three years of World War II's end, starvation had been basically eliminated in Japan, and yet the Japanese had continued slaving away as if their lives depend on it. Why? To create a more abundant life? If so, where was the abundance? Where were the luxurious living spaces? Eyesores dominated the scenery wherever you went, and people still crammed themselves into packed commuter trains each morning, submitting to conditions that would be fatal for any other mammal. Apparently what

I mutter and mutter and no one to listen. I speak my words in Japanese and my daughter will not hear them. The words that come from our ears, our mouths, they collide in the space between us."Obachan, please! I wish you would stop that. Is it too much to ask for some peace and quiet? You do this on purpose, don’t you? Don’t you! I just want some peace. Just stop! Please, just stop.""Gomennasai. Waruine, Obachan wa. Solly. Solly."Ha! Keiko, there is method in my madness. I could stand on my head

[The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living.

I have been brought up in a world dominated by honor. I have known neither crime, poverty, nor betrayal, and here I taste hatred for the first time: it is sublime, like a thirst for justice and revenge."-the girl who played go

Last year nothing happenedThe year before nothing happenedAnd the year before that nothinghappened.

From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.

A feeling of liberation should contain a bracing feeling of negation, in which liberation itself is not negated. In the moment a captive lion steps out of his cage, he possesses a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds to him; the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the ca

Real haiku is the soul of poetry. Anything that is not actually present in one's heart is not haiku. The moon glows, flowers bloom, insects cry, water flows. There is no place we cannot find flowers or think of the moon. This is the essence of haiku. Go beyond the restrictions of your era, forget about purpose or meaning, separate yourself from historical limitations—there you will find the essence of true art, religion, and science.

When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.

Haiku is not a shriek, a howl, a sigh, or a yawn; rather, it is the deep breath of life.

Bushido is realized in the presence of death. This means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. There is no other reasoning.

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The blue of the sky is one of the most special colors in the world, because the color is deep but see-through both at the same time.

Calligraphy is an art form that uses ink and a brush to express the very souls of words on paper.

During the reign of Domitian (81-96 A.D.), Christians in Asia Minor were severely oppressed. The book of Revelation was likely written at this time to encourage them not to apostatize and not even to compromise their faith. No doubt some believers felt that they could meet the demands of the state without denying their master. They could argue that calling Christ 'Lord' and calling Caesar 'Lord' were not in conflict, since the term Lord could mean Sir as well as God. And as far as the Roman gove

Toyohiko Kagawa, famed for his ministry to slum-dwellers, paid tribute to all three of Japan's major religious traditions. 'I am grateful for Shinto, for Buddhism, and for Confucianism,' he wrote. To Shinto he attributed his spirit of reverence; to Buddhism, his craving for transcendent values, including compassion and selflessness; to Confucianism, his efforts to follow the golden mean of humaneness and harmony in society. Kagawa saw Christ in the priestly robes of all these religions.

Tea followers were among the earliest converts to the Christian faith. Takayama Ukon, a daimyo turned ardent evangelist, was a disciple of Sen no Rikyu, the preeminent tea master of all time. After Christianity had been banned - Takayama was exiled to the Philippines - underground Christians cherished the tea ceremony as the only opportunity to assemble without arousing suspicion on the part of the authorities. It proved to be a fitting substitute for Holy Communion; even in its Zen context the

Psychologically, Japanese women depend largely on each other. In their sex-segregated society, they could be criticized for living in a female ghetto, and yet they have what some American feminists are trying to build, a ”women’s culture” with its own customs, values and even language.

Just as there is an archetype of woman as the object of man's eternal love, so there must be an archetype of her as the object of his eternal fear, representing, perhaps, the shadow of his own evil actions.

In a time like this, let us trust in God even more. To trust when life is easy is no trust.

The Japanese have two words: "uchi" meaning inside and "soto" meaning outside. Uchi refers to their close friends, the people in their inner circle. Soto refers to anyone who is outside that circle. And how they relate and communicate to the two are drastically different. To the soto, they are still polite and they might be outgoing, on the surface, but they will keep them far away, until they are considered considerate and trustworthy enough to slip their way into the uchi category. Once you ar

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.

Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things.

The bells of the Gion monastery in India echo with the warning that all things are impermanent. The blossoms of the sala trees teach us through their hues that what flourishes must fade. The proud do not prevail for long but vanish like a spring night’s dream. In time the mighty, too, succumb: all are dust before the wind.

Those who get in the way of love's path will be kicked by horses.~Kyoya

Itsumademo ai shiteru, Yuki. I love you forever, my daughter.

Haiku does not express emotion from the inside out by displaying the mind of a character. Haiku builds the emotional thrust, makes the artistic statement from the outside in, from the physical world to the mind of the reader.

It would seem that the more irresponsible and crafty one is, the more likely one is to have a talent for storytelling.

In retrospect, these events are discouraging: too many scientists seem to have been in the service of money and power. Too many in the media saw it as their duty to be "neutral" by uncritically reporting every theory, rather than investigating who sponsored them and whether they were backed by solid evidence. Too many government officials seem to have been willing to sacrifice poor fisherfolk on the altar of high growth.

Most white Americans were willing to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of national security as long as they were the civil liberties of someone else.

As you can imagine, those who had fallen this far had been so worn down by their tortures in the seven other hells that they no longer had the strength to cry out.

Directly beneath the Lotus Pond of Paradise lay the lower depths of Hell, and as He peered through the crystalline waters, He could see the River of Three Crossings and the Mountain of Needles as clearly as if He were viewing pictures in a peep-box.

Great robber though he was, Kandata could only trash about like a dying frog as he choked on the blood of the pond.

A faint tear wet Meiko's eye, so slight a bit of moisture that it passed unseen by Yasuko. Yet all the anguish of which she never spoke was compressed into that single drop

They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no reason a child commits murder, just as there's no reason a child gets lost. What would it be - because his parents weren't watching him? That's not a reason, it's just a step in the process.

A lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I've done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' movies.

Japanese architecture is traditionally based on wooden structures that need renovating on a regular basis.

I was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. I was there in Shanghai when, the morning after Pearl Harbor, they seized Shanghai.

The Japanese do not fear God. They only fear bombs.

And then there was her face: her white skin, her brown eyes, and her expression, so soft and beautiful; she looked as though she were constantly getting ready to ask a question. Even an immaculately crafted doll could not have been as lovely.

Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.

I've deprived my family in order to buy books. No doubt there is a special punishment in hell for such self-indulgence. Perhaps I shall be struck with blindness among the rarest known to men.

When you're in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who's decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with whether he remembered to lock the door when he left home.

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.

You all have your own distinct personal backgrounds. Of course some of you come from rich families, some from poor families. But circumstances beyond your control like that shouldn’t determine who you are. You must all realize what you’re worth on your own.

When I went on anyway, my body began to grow cold, and I thought I was dead. Face pale, my dead self sat down on a bench and began to turn toward my real self, who was watching this hallucination on the screen of the night. My dead self came nearer, just as if it might want to shake hands with my real self. That's when I panicked and tried to run. But my dead self pursued me and finally caught me, entered me and controlled me. I'd felt then just the way I felt now. I felt as if a hole had opened

From the girl who sat before me now...surged a fresh and physical life force. She was like a small animal that has popped into the world with the coming of spring. Her eyes moved like an independent organism with joy, laughter, anger, amazement, and despair. I hadn't seen a face so vivid and expressive in ages, and I enjoyed watching it live and move.

Allowing ourselves to become pure point of view, we hang in midair over the city. What we see now is a gigantic metropolis waking up. Commuter trains of many colors move in all directions, transporting people from place to place. Each of those under transport is a human being with a different face and mind, and at the same time each is a nameless part of the collective identity. Each is simultaneously a self-contained whole and a mere part. Handling this dualism of theirs skillfully and advantag

Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books.

I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling.

Yes," I continued, "I discovered this model recently and her style never fails to be mathematically perfect. She seems to come by it naturally. As if she were born resonant. I notice Japanese models tend to do this. Like I said, they seem to have resonance somewhere deep in their culture. But Yuri Nakagawa, she's the best I've ever seen. The best model, with the most powerful resonance. I need her to probe deeper into this profound mathematical instinct, which I call resonance.

I had a dream about you last night. In this dream we were walking down the beautiful Japanese streets of Florida. Fukuoka is nice in the summer.

Sheer effort enables those with nothing to surpass those with privilege and position.

I know I have a pretty good sense for music, but she was better than me. I used to think it was such a waste! I thought, ‘If only she had started out with a good teacher and gotten the proper training, she’d be so much further along!’ But I was wrong about that. She was not the kind of child who could stand proper training. There just happen to be people like that. They’re blessed with this marvelous talent, but they can’t make the effort to systematize it. They end up squandering it in little b

Japan!everything in details perfection.

I could have sworn that the man's eyes were no longer watching his daughter dying in agony, that instead the gorgeous colors of flames and the sight of a woman suffering in them were giving him joy beyond measure.

The pale whiteness of her upturned face as she choked on the smoke; the tangled length of her hair as she tried to shake the flames from it; the beauty of her cherry-blossom robe as it burst into flame: it was all so cruel, so terrible!

Chained inside the carriage is a sinful woman. When we set the carriage afire, her flesh will be roasted, her bones will be charred: she will die an agonizing death. Never again will you have such a perfect model for the screen. Do not fail to watch as her snow-white flesh erupts in flames. See and remember her long black hair dancing in a whirl of sparks!

Still more horrible was the color of the flames that licked the latticed cabin vents before shooting skyward, as though - might I say? - the sun itself had crashed to earth, spewing its heavenly fire in all directions.

She trailed behind Baba and Jiji as they left the palace, nightingales singing a sad farewell.

This was her heritage. Her people. So why did she feel so small and weak? So far removed from it?

Mrs Guinea answered my letter and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first finger-bowl.The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutant I knew at college about dinner, that I learned what I had done.

Dinner that night is a feast of flavor. To celebrate the successful exorcism, Kagura has cooked several more dishes than the shrine's usual, simple fare- fragrant onigiri, balls of rice soaked in green tea, with umeboshi- salty and pickled plums- as filling. There is eggplant simmered in clear soup, green beans in sesame sause, and burdock in sweet-and-sour dressing. The mood is festive.

Jim watched them eat, his eyes fixed on every morsel that entered their mouth. When the oldest of the four soldiers had finished he scraped some burnt rice and fish scales from the side of the cooking pot. A first-class private of some forty years, with slow, careful hands, he beckoned Jim forward and handed him his mess tin. As they smoked their cigarettes the Japanese smiled to themselves, watching Jim devour the shreds of fatty rice. It was his first hot food since he had left he hospital, an

When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, 'What is the sound of the waterfall?' 'Silence,' he finally told me.

Whereas, in the west, individuality and drive are considered positive qualities, they are not seen the same way, in Japan. In that country, if you are too much of a rugged individualist, it might actually indicate that you are a weak, unreliable character and that you are selfish, in a childish, willful kind of way.

...O-suzu left whatever work she was doing at her sewing machine and dragged Takeo back to O-yoshi and her son.How dare you behave so selfishly! Now tell O-yoshi-san that you are sorry. Get down on the mats and make a proper bow!

Otaku (おた) is also a formal way of saying "you". た means "house", and with the honorific お, it literally means "your honorable house", implying that you are less of a person and more of a place, fixed in space and contained under a roof. Makes sense that the stereotype of the modern otaku is a shut-in, an obsessed loner and social isolate who rarely leaves his house.

And yet, as you all know, joining humanity is never a simple matter. By beginning to live the same temporality as Westerners, the Japanese now had to live two temporalities simultaneously. On the one hand, there was Time with a capital "T," which flows in the West. On the other hand, there was time with a small "t," which flows in Japan. Moreover, from that point on, the latter could exist only in relation to the former. It could no longer exist independently, yet it could not be the same as the

Dad says there are more than three thousand letters in the Japanese alphabet, which could pose a problem. There are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, and I get into enough trouble with them as it is.

Welcome to thee,O sword of eternity!Through BuddhaAnd through Daruma alikeThou hast cleft thy way.