Haruki Murakami Quotes

Working against a restriction - for me - often produces greater things than getting rid of all boundaries.

The important thing for me when I look at characters is to consider the kind of constraints placed upon them. Now, me personally, I don't like to have a lot of constraints placed upon me.

A kite needs to be tied down in order to fly. I learned how important restrictions can sometimes be in order to experience freedom.

I think constraints are very important. They're positive, because they allow you to work off something.

I can DO ANYTHING I want, but I can't DO EVERYTHING I want.

One's range [of ideas] is limited by one's interests and imagination and by one's passion.

Don't accept the limitations of other people who claim things are 'unchangeable'. If it's written in stone, bring your hammer and chisel.

Whenever I draw a circle, I immediately want to step out of it.

I’m interested in what people do with the chaos in their lives and how they respond to it, and simultaneously what they do with what they feel like are limitations. If they push against these limitations, will they wind up in the realm of chaos, or will they push against limitations and wind up in the world of freedom?

People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.

Teach yourself freedom with the same zeal that the world has taught you limits.

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.

Honestly, orthodoxy concerns me about as much as it concerns your average jackrabbit. I only follow rules that take me where I want to go. If there aren't any rules, I make up my own and follow them strictly.

I think everybody wants to be their own person and be an individual.

Ten guards and the warden couldn't have torn me out of those books. Months passed without even thinking about being imprisoned....I had never been so truly free in my life.

Don't think you have to be good because you're the only one left. Be as bad as you like.

The premise of Kiss has always been to not live within the confinements and boundaries other people set for themselves. We set our own limitations, and those are no limitations.

I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to.

Listen,' he said. 'It's important. We are all. Free. To do. Whatever. We want. To do.

Man is really not freeing many aspects. He is dependent on his social circumstances, but he is free in his thinking, and here is the point of origin of sculpture. For me the formation of the thought is already sculpture. The thought is sculpture.

I think that too ended up affecting a lot of the different research questions that I later asked was really was about well to what extent... How do we balance choice as possibility and choice as limitations?

The imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.

Intellectual liberty is the air of the soul, the sunshine of the mind, and without it, the world is a prison, the universe is a dungeon.

More and more I'm aware that the permutations are not unlimited.