top of page
.png){kind=small}
"After I got married, the first child born to us was mentally handicapped."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Suffering quotes
"One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary."
"Although it pains me to admit it, I am quite familiar with the holes in life. And this familiarity is due to the fact that I spend far more time in these holes than I spend on the paths that brought me to them."
"The saints have to 'drink poison' (worldly suffering) and the world has to 'drink nectar' (worldly pleasures). Because people are weak."
"Discharge [disposal of karma] is in nature's hands. That's why there is restlessness. That is why these are the pains of dependency [association]. There are such times man has to face that it becomes difficult for him to pass even one hour."
"As long as there is worldly life, one is going to attain physical body, and as long as there is a body, there will be worldly miseries and troubles."
"If you allow it, [suffering] can be the means by which God brings you His greatest blessings."
"The suffering that is there in this world is such that it will fall off (go away), but people give support to it."
"Someone may have a broken heart or someone may have a broken ego. Such people will have to suffer tremendously because of that."
Explore more quotes by Kenzaburo Oe
"Even though we now have the half-century-old new Constitution, there is a popular sentiment of support for the old one that lives on in reality in some quarters."
"Paradoxically, the people and state of Japan living on such moral props were not innocent but had been stained by their own past history of invading other Asian countries."
"From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan's prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at large."
"The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War."
"My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity."
"In the recent years there have been criticisms levelled against Japan suggesting that she should offer more military forces to the United Nations forces and thereby play a more active role in the keeping and restoration of peace in various parts of the world."
"As I grew up, I was continually to suffer hardships in different realms of life - in my family, in my relationship to Japanese society and in my way of living at large in the latter half of the twentieth century."
"The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia."
"In Japan itself there have all along been attempts by some to obliterate the article about renunciation of war from the Constitution and for this purpose they have taken every opportunity to make use of pressures from abroad."
bottom of page