Living is no laughing matter: you must live with great seriousness like a squirrel for example – I mean without looking for something beyond and above living, I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Category Archive: 1901
There can be no literary equivalent to truth.
That most unfortunate war, which I deeply deplore.
Because most people are not sufficiently employed in themselves, they run about loose, hungering for employment, and satisfy themselves in various supererogatory occupations. The easiest of these occupations, which have all to do with making things already made, is the making of people: it is called the art of friendship.
I feel an intense intimacy with those who have this loathing interest in me. Further than this, I know what they mean, I sympathize with them, I understand them. There should be a name (as poetic as love) for this relationship between loather and loathed; it is of the closest and more full of passion than incest.
Art indeed is a term referring to the social source and to the social utility of creative acts.
It is only a step from boredom to disillusionment, which leads naturally to self-pity, which in turn ends in chaos.
To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.
The war has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.
I believe that misconceptions about oneself that one does not correct where possible act as a bad magic.