History, the winnowing wind, never halts. We see the chaff rise, forget the waiting grain, seed of the future, fallen to the threshing floor. We never learn, but live on, slit-narrow, as if our living were a pencil line traced upon paper, behaving as trapped denizens of a flat world hemmed in by the bigoted horizon of our own making. Yet the meaning of living is a pushing back, a pulling down of the great walls and domes of fear and ignorance, is relinquishing the nest for the sky, ignorance for understanding. The look back is also a look forward.

Strange are the ways of history, where no single thing abides, but all things flow into each other, fragment to fragment clinging.

One should never condemn what one cannot understand.

People never think about words, they only feel them.

The rice bowl is to me the most valid reason in the world for doing anything. A piece of one's soul to the multitudes in return for rice and wine does not seem to me a sacrilege.

There is nothing stronger in the world than gentleness.

We are all products of our time, vulnerable to history.