...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.

For an artist to do creative work, he needs at once physical health and some physiomental ill health. He needs both serenity and gloom.

Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.

According to Eshin's Essentials of Salvation, the Ten Pleasures are but a drop in the ocean when compared to the joys of the Pure Land.

I cried sobbingly until at last those visions reeking with blood came to comfort me. And then I surrendered myself to them, to those deplorably brutal visions, my most intimate friends.

Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music.

A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.