There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.

For a long time I had not approached the forbidden fruit called happiness, but it was now tempting me with a melancholy persistence. I felt as though Sonoko were an abyss above which I stood poised.

Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.

If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death No death may be called futile.

Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.

Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.

By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive Truth.