Inspirational Quotes by Haruki Murakami — Words of Wisdom for Daily Success

“Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.”

“Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.”

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”

“For a while" is a phrase whose length can't be measured.At least by the person who's waiting.”

“Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.”

“Or maybe that’s what it’s all about: this religion’s substance is its lack of substance.”

“اینو میتونم بهت بگم که زیاد پیشش نبودم و حرفی هم باهم نزدیم اما احساس میکنم الان انگار درون من زندگی میکنه. مثل اینکه بخشی از منه. نمی‌دونم چطوری بگم.”

“Of course it hurt that we could never love each other in a physical way. We would have been far more happy if we had. But that was like the tides, the change of seasons--something immutable, an immovable destiny we could never alter. No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn't going to last forever. We were bound to reach a dead end. That was painfully clear.”

“So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the”

“Life, after all, was a long, drawn-out struggle. No matter how much sadness there was, how much loss and despair awaited us, you had to steadily move forward, step by painful step.”

“This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.”

“We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something - with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.”

“Wherever there's hope there's a trial.”

“Wasn't it better if they kept this desire to see each other hidden within them, and never actually got together? That way, there would always be hope in their hearts. That hope would be a small, yet vital flame that warmed them to their core-- a tiny flame to cup one's hands around and protect from the wind, a flame that the violent winds of reality might easily extinguish.”

“I like to read books. I like to listen to music. I collect records. And cats. I don't have any cats right now. But if I'm taking a walk and I see a cat, I'm happy.”

“I've heard it said that the happiest time in our lives is the period when pop songs really mean”

“Don't blame me. That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution.”

“There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.”

“Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn't seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.”

“I find myself thinking about my ongoing existence as a human being and the path that lies ahead of me. Though of course these thoughts lead to but one place - death.”

“Dying is the only way/ For you to float free: / Nomonhan”

“A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. you’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.”

“Death leaves cans of shaving cream half-used.”

“It's unfair.”

“I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.”

“If there's any guy crazy enough to attack me, I'm going to show him the end of the world -- close up. I'm going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I'm going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies.”

“That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive.”

“Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.”

“Aren't you afraid of dying?”

“Tell me, Doctor, are you afraid of death?”

“My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.”

“People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.”

“No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.”

“My grandpa always said asking a question is embarrass for a moment but not asking a question is embarrasing for a life time”

“La vida es esencialmente injusta. De eso no cabe la menor duda. Pero creo que incluso de las situaciones injustas es posible extraer lo que de "justicia" haya en ellas. Puede que ello cueste tiempo y esfuerzo. Y puede que ese tiempo y esfuerzo sean en vano. Decidir si merece o no la pena intentar extraer esa "justicia" es algo que, queda al criterio de cada uno.”

“Tendencies. Yougottendencies. Soevenifyoudideverythingoveragain, yourwholelife, yougottendenciestodojustwhatyoudid, alloveragain. -The Sheep Man.”

“Las cosas fluyen hacia donde tienen que fluir, y por más que te esfuerces e intentes hacerlo lo mejor posible, cuando llega el momento de herir a alguien lo hieres. La vida es así.”

“It's just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me.”

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

“Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)”

“People have their own reasons for dying. It might look simple, but it never is. It's just like a rock. What's above ground is only a small part of it. But if you start pulling, it keeps coming and coming. The human mind dwells deep in darkness. Only the person himself knows the real reason, and maybe not even then.”

“It may well be that we can never fully adapt to our own deformities. Unable to”

“Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.”

“I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all.”

“It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit.”

“Loving another person is a wonderful thing, and if that love is sincere, no one ends up tossed into a labyrinth. You have to have more faith in yourself.”

“This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be a”

“Es decir..., lo que yo creo es que el hombre piensa en el significado de la vida porque sabe con certeza que va morir algún día. (...) Nadie sabe lo que va a ocurrir. Por eso nosotros, para evolucionar necesitamos la muerte.”

“The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.”

“In the name of God, they stole her time and her freedom, putting shackles on her heart. They preached about God's kindness, but preached twice as much about his wrath and intolerance.”

“The Boss is an honorable man. After the Lord, the most godly person I've ever met.”

“Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match. Like pulling on a Missoni sweater over Trussardi slacks and Pollini shoes, you can now enjoy hybrid styles of morality. It's the way of the world -- philosophy starting to look more and more like business administration.”

“A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need to do is move from reason that ‘observes’ to reason that ‘acts’. That’s what critical.”

“The darkness behind my closed eyelids was like the cloud-covered sky, but the gray was somewhat deeper. Every few minutes, someone would come and paint over the gray with a different-textured gray - one with a touch of gold or green or red. I was impressed with the variety of grays that existed. Human beings were so strange. All you had to do was sit still for ten minutes, and you could see this amazing variety of grays.”

“Snow floated down every once in a while, but it was frail snow, like a memory fading into the distance.”

“You know, they've got these chocolate assortments, and you like some but you don't like others? And you eat all the ones you like, and the only ones left are the ones you don't like as much? I always think about that when something painful comes up. Now I just have to”

“I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I’m a weak person, that I bruise easily, don’t you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It’s like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere.”

“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?”

“No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.”