Great Throughts Treasury

"The mission of art is to achieve a deeper understanding of nature’s beauty. The mission, to put it another way, is to observe nature with an artistic mind, a mind bent on discovering beauty. Therefore, the kind of nature that the average person sees does not make art when it is reproduced."

"Art, when it is forgetful of nature, degrades itself. Degraded art is, I feel, like the expressionless face of a lovely princess born of a noble family."

"I am the ancestor, everything begins with me."

"He asked himself why it was that women were so relentlessly pursued by their own past sins while men were not?there was no denying that women on the whole were more prone to be plunged into a life of despair."

"I want to see what no one else has seen, I want to hear what no one else has heard, I want to feel as no one else has felt."

"He resented Ishimoto?s assumption that the stuff of gossip could immediately be translated into writing."

"It is hazardous to health to be frequently exposed to the ugliness and folly in human life."

"It was because lately I?d felt intolerably frustrated by the fact that I did not have a life of my own. I went to bed, but I couldn?t sleep at all. I thought about all sorts of things. I felt as if my present existence in which, like a grub suspended in midair, I looked to one side and the other, always hesitating, without the courage to want what I wanted, without the courage to get rid of what was unbearable."

"The true pleasure of reading, then, is the pleasure of a kind of spiritual communion with great men: ?Our eyes are opened to whatever qualities hidden within ourselves we might share with them. Our mind and spirit grow taut."

"To take some part in the making of mankind?s happiness, to leave some mark on the path of human progress, and so realize the life of the artist."

"Was it because he thought that women, being passive, were ultimately defenseless?"

"Why couldn?t you find something other than your family to write about? The trouble with him is that he has no sympathy for your profession, and has no idea what writing is all about"