Haruki Murakami Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. 1Q84

2. And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing. Sputnik Sweetheart

3. And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about. Kafka on the Shore

4. Being with her I feel a pain, like a frozen knife stuck in my chest. An awful pain, but the funny thing is I'm thankful for it. It's like that frozen pain and my very existence are one.The pain is an anchor, mooring me here. Kafka on the Shore

5. Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt. Norwegian Wood

6. Don't blame me. That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

7. Es decir..., lo que yo creo es que el hombre piensa en el significado de la vida porque sabe con certeza que va morir algún día. (...) Nadie sabe lo que va a ocurrir. Por eso nosotros, para evolucionar necesitamos la muerte. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

8. Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless. Norwegian Wood

9. For a long time, she held a special place in my heart. I kept this special place just for her, like a "Reserved" sign on a quiet corner table in a restaurant. Despite the fact that I was sure I'd never see her again. South of the Border, West of the Sun

10. here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her? But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair. South of the Border, West of the Sun

11. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. Norwegian Wood

12. I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning. Norwegian Wood

13. I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning. Norwegian Wood

14. I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong. South of the Border, West of the Sun

15. I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. Norwegian Wood

16. I was still young, certain that this kind of thrilling event happened all the time. Later in life, I realized how wrong I was. Sputnik Sweetheart

17. I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all, I can't even love myself. Why is that? Why can't I love myself? It's because I can't love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself. 1Q84

18. I've been lonely for so long. And I've been hurt so deeply. If only I could have met you again a long time ago, then I wouldn't have had to take all these detours to get here.'Tengo shook his head. 'I don't think so. This way is just fine. This is exactly the right time. For both of us. [...] We needed that much time.... to understand how lonely we really were. 1Q84

19. If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even if you can't get together with that person. 1Q84

20. If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets. Kafka on the Shore

21. In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive. Kafka on the Shore

22. In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene. Norwegian Wood

23. Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone? The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

24. It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit. Norwegian Wood

25. It's just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me. After the Quake

26. It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. Kafka on the Shore

27. La vida es esencialmente injusta. De eso no cabe la menor duda. Pero creo que incluso de las situaciones injustas es posible extraer lo que de "justicia" haya en ellas. Puede que ello cueste tiempo y esfuerzo. Y puede que ese tiempo y esfuerzo sean en vano. Decidir si merece o no la pena intentar extraer esa "justicia" es algo que, queda al criterio de cada uno. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

28. Las cosas fluyen hacia donde tienen que fluir, y por más que te esfuerces e intentes hacerlo lo mejor posible, cuando llega el momento de herir a alguien lo hieres. La vida es así. Norwegian Wood

29. Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdi-vided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfash-ionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match. Like pulling on a Missoni sweater over Trussardi slacks and Pollini shoes, you can now enjoy hybrid styles of morality. It's the way of the world—philosophy starting to look more and more like business administration.Although I didn't think so at the time, things were a lot simpler in 1969. All you had to do to express yourself was throw rocks at riot police. But with today's sophistication, who's in a position to throw rocks? Who's going to brave what tear gas? C'mon, that's the way it is. Everything is rigged, tied into that massive capital web, and beyond this web there's another web. Nobody's going anywhere. You throw a rock and it'll come right back at you. Dance Dance Dance

30. Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)