1) People are unhappy when they get something too easily. You have to sweat--that's the only moral they know.,"Dany Laferrière, I Am a japanese Writer"

2) "I like the relaxed way in which the japanese approach religion. I think of myself as basically a moral person, but I'm definitely not religious, and I'm very tired of the preachiness and obsession with other people's behavior characteristic of many religious people in the United States. As far as I could tell, there's nothing preachy about Buddhism. I was in a lot of temples, and I still don't know what Buddhists believe, except that at one point Kunio said 'If you do bad things, you will be reborn as an ox.'This makes as much sense to me as anything I ever heard from, for example, the Reverend Pat Robertson.","Dave Barry, Dave Barry Does japan"

3) "No art takes places without inspiration. Every artist also needs effective knowledge of his or her tools (e.g., does a certain brush function well with a particular kind of paint?). What’s more, artists need effective techniques for using those tools.Likewise, to express ourselves skillfully with maximum efficiency and minimum effort, we need to investigate the most effective ways of using the mind and body since, in the end, they are the only “tools” we truly possess in life.","H. E. Davey, japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation"

4) "Humankind has accumulated generation upon generation of knowledge, the culmination of which is the vast and useful technological array we see everywhere in modern society. Despite this great accumulation of knowledge and technology, we still suffer from starvation and war. The difference between the past and the present is the difference between throwing rocks and shooting missiles. We are still in conflict. Suffering on a fundamental level hasn’t ceased. But we nevertheless persist in the notion that if we just amass a bit more knowledge, we’ll all be o.k. Maybe a new philosophy will do the trick, or a new system of government. But all of this has been tried many times.Knowledge builds on the past and has its place. Wisdom is beyond time. It’s the direct perception of reality as it is. And in this direct seeing of what is lies the potential of transformation—a transformation that is not merely a redecoration of the past but a transformation of humanity that embodies the eternally new.","H.E. Davey, japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation"

5) "Whether Hindus or Greeks, Egyptians or japanese, Chinese, Sumerians, or ancient Americans -- or even Romans, the most ""modern"" among people of antiquity -- they all placed the Golden Age, the Age of Truth, the rule of Kronos or of Ra or of any other gods on earth -- the glorious beginning of the slow, downward unfurling of history, whatever name it be given -- far behind them in the past.","Savitri Devi, The Lightning And The Sun"

6) "Memorizing someone else’s explanation of the truth isn’t the same as seeing the truth for yourself. It is what it is—the memorization of second-hand knowledge. It is not your experience. It is not your knowledge. And no matter how much material is learned by rote, and no matter how eloquently we can speak about the memorized information, we’re clinging to a description of something that’s not ours. What’s more, the description is never the item itself. By holding onto our impression of certain descriptions, we frequently are unable to see the real thing when it’s right before our eyes. We are conditioned by memorizing and believing concepts—the truth of which we’ve never genuinely seen for ourselves.","H.E. Davey, japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation"

7) "If love goes too far, it turns into cruelty.","Haruo Shirane, Early Modern japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900"

8) "Tokyo is bigger than Kumamoto. And japan is bigger than Tokyo. And even bigger than japan... Even bigger than japan is the inside of your head. Don't ever surrender yourself ― not to japan, not to anything. You may think that what you're doing is for the sake of the nation, but let something take possession of you like that, and all you do is bring it down.","Sōseki Natsume, Sanshirō"

9) "Nos-tal-gic,’ Akira said, as though it were a word he had been struggling to find. Then he said a word in japanese, perhaps the japanese for ‘nostalgic.’ ‘Nos-tal-gic. It is good to be nos-tal-gic. Very important.’‘Really, old fellow?’‘Important. Very important. Nostalgic. When we nostalgic, we remember. A world better than this world we discover when we grow. We remember and wish good world come back again. So very important. Just now, I had dream. I was boy. Mother, Father, close to me. in our house.’He fell silent and continued to gaze across the rubble.‘Akira,’ I said, sensing that the longer this talk went on, the greater was some danger I did not wish fully to articulate. ‘We should move on. We have much to do.","Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans"

10) "His smiling face revealed a love too strong to be kept inside, but the feelings obviously rising inside him kept him from looking directly at Kikunojou. He gazed instead at Kikunojou's clear reflection on the water.","Haruo Shirane, Early Modern japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900"

11) "Dead my old fine hopesAnd dry my dreaming but still...Iris, blue each spring","Bashō Matsuo, japanese Haiku"

12) "People pontificate, ""Suicide is selfishness."" Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.","David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas"

13) "The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.","Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake"

14) "On the Death of his ChildDew Evaporates And all our world is dew...so dear, So fresh, so fleeting","Kobayashi Issa, japanese Haiku"

15) "During my tenure at Bradford College, located in Haverhill Massachusetts - Assemblies of God, and Northpoint Bible College had not yet taken over. The school was very prestigious and expensive, but was worth every penny spent, and left me with an experience of which I shall indeed never forget. I say this for a couple of reasons. First, my degree major was in creative arts (creative writing) and psychology as my minor. Later in life, I was able to use my degree to become an award-winning, and best-selling horror author, and producer. Something by the way for which I am very proud of today. I truly owe this all from what I learned at this remarkable school.""""So indeed I have great things to speak of when harping back to my Bradford college days. In addition, I was also able to make wonderful connections with many famous people who's sons and daughters attended this school. One of my roommates was David Charles who is Bob Charle's son. Bob Charles was a famous professional golfer."" ""To date, pondering on my college days spent at Bradford College has given me an appreciation for which I am very grateful for. I wanted to say, ""thank you"" for being part of the reason why I have prospered."" ""I am a proud graduate of Bradford, and all others whom also attended should also be more than proud of their attendance there. Thank you again, and God Bless you. one of my other roommates was japanese chap, and his father was some kind of high political ruler of the country at the time. Thinking back on all this makes me proud of having been affiliated with Bradford College. Thank you.",Chris Mentillo

16) "The History TeacherTrying to protect his students' innocencehe told them the Ice Age was really justthe Chilly Age, a period of a million yearswhen everyone had to wear sweaters.And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,named after the long driveways of the time.The Spanish Inquisition was nothing morethan an outbreak of questions such as""How far is it from here to Madrid?""""What do you call the matador's hat?""The War of the Roses took place in a garden,and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on japan.The children would leave his classroomfor the playground to torment the weakand the smart,mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,while he gathered up his notes and walked homepast flower beds and white picket fences,wondering if they would believe that soldiersin the Boer War told long, rambling storiesdesigned to make the enemy nod off.","Billy Collins, Questions About Angels"

17) "A fallen blossomreturning to the bough, I thought --But no, a butterfly.","Arakida Moritake, Traditional japanese Poetry: An Anthology"

18) "japan likewise put her hopes of victory on a different basis from that prevalent in the United States. (...) Even when she was winning, her civilian statesmen, her High Command, and her soldiers repeated that this was no contest between armaments; it was pitting of our faith in things against their faith in spirit.","Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of japanese Culture"

19) "I was reading, absorbed in an assault on K2 by a team of japanese mountaineers, my lungs constricting in the thin burning air, the deadly sting of wind-lashed ice in my face, when the record -- Le Sacre du Printemps -- caught in the groove with a gnashing squeal as if a stageful of naiads, dryads and spandex satyrs had simultaneously gone lame.",T.C. Boyle

20) "You are all misleading one another, and are yourselves deceived. The sun does not go round the earth, but the earth goes round the sun, revolving as it goes, and turning towards the sun in the course of each twenty-four hours, not only japan, and the Philippines, and Sumatra where we now are, but Africa, and Europe, and America, and many lands besides. The sun does not shine for some one mountain, or for some one island, or for some one sea, nor even for one earth alone, but for other planets as well as our earth. If you would only look up at the heavens, instead of at the ground beneath your own feet, you might all understand this, and would then no longer suppose that the sun shines for you, or for your country alone.","Leo Tolstoy, Eleven Stories"

21) "While we can learn or study techniques for almost anything we might want to accomplish, real understanding is not the mere accumulation of knowledge. Understanding cannot be realized by listening or reading about the realization of others. It must be achieved firsthand via substantive, direct perception in the moment.","H.E. Davey, japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation"