top of page
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Observation quotes

"You are not walking slow enough, when taking a walk, if you do not come across as bored or depressed (to the average sane person)."

"When you patiently examine the beautiful skin of the leopard after it's hard day's search for the meat it enjoys, you shall not only see the sweat that went into its search for the meat, but you shall also realize the scent of the sweat beneath the beautiful skin."

"Quiet people always know more than they seem. Although very normal, their inner world is by default fronted mysterious and therefore assumed weird. Never underestimate the social awareness and sense of reality in a quiet person; they are some of the most observant, absorbent persons of all."

"Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and heroines to the heights of rapture - still seldomer sink them to the depths of despair; for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish."

"The bowl is warmer than the soup."

"An idiot child screaming in a hospital. (on George Bernard Shaw)"

"Generally, there is a lot of truth value in stepping back, observing, then logically generalizing the extremes of what you see."

"While humans play God, dogs learn from their masters."

"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines."
Explore more quotes by Kenzaburo Oe

"By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors."

"However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world."

"The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia."

"I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large."

"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."

"After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution."

"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