Haruki Murakami Quotes

From a certain point of view our real enemy, the true troublemaker, is inside.

Why am I always at war with myself? Why have I told, as if upon compulsion, what I knew all along I ought to have withheld? Why am I making a friend of this woman beside me, in spite of the whispers against her that I hear in my heart?

Some of the greatest battles will be fought within the silent chambers of your own soul.

The greatest conflicts are not between two people but between one person and himself.

I'm my own worst enemy and I know that.

The greatest enemy one ever faces is one's own self.

My biggest enemy is typically me.

One thing I learned about that I always knew about myself - that I always been afraid of myself.

Inside each of us is a David and a Goliath.

If your heart tells you something but your mind tells you something else, which do you believe? Both are just as apt to lie. In fact, they play at deceit all the time. Mostly they balance each other, giving us that crucial reality check. But what happens on the rare occasions when they conspire together?

That's the first time I've ever said those words out loud, and now I hear how strange they are. How many young men fear that there is a monster instead them? People are supposed to fear others, not themselves.

Your enemy is your own self in a different uniform.

Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them. Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed. I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room. The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love. My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.

Anthony looked down at his evil clutches -- hands, he reminded himself, hands -- and grinned anew.

I feel like a big faker because I've been putting my life back together, and nobody knows.

But in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me and dampens and injures some things in me that I value.

Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.

My toughest enemy is in the mirror - would you look at that.

You never know what's right, what you feel inside versus what is portrayed.

But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

Do you even know who the enemy is?" "I think... it's me".

The most regular and most perfect soul in the world has but too much to do to keep itself upright from being overthrown by its own weakness.

I would much rather fight pride than vanity, because pride has a stand-up way of fighting. You know where it is. It throws its black shadow on you, and you are not at a loss where to strike. But vanity is that delusive, that insectiferous, that multiplied feeling, and men that fight vanities are like men that fight midges and butterflies. It is easier to chase them than to hit them.

All through it, I have known myself to be quite undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire- a fire, however, inseparable in its nature from myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no service, idly burning away.

Faust complained about having two souls in his breast, but I harbor a whole crowd of them and they quarrel. It is like being in a republic.