To leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide yourself in a farmhouse is not life -- it is egoism, laziness; it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free spirit.

My nation, as all nations, is becoming a land without peace, without thought, without mind, Madam Abbess. We are suffocating our spirits in commercial and material things. This is not envy, said Mr. Konishi earnestly. I am a rich man, with much business, so I have succeeded in all these things, but I know that they are empty.

The human heartIs unknowable.But in my birthplaceThe flowers still smellThe same as always.

Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

The convent is supreme egotism resulting in supreme self-denial.

Monastic incarceration is castration.