Top 150 Arthur Golden Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.”

— Arthur Golden

2. “The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.”

— Arthur Golden

Featured in: Depression Quotes, Heartbreak Quotes, Grief Quotes

3. “At the temple there is a poem called “Loss” carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.”

— Arthur Golden

4. “A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course of victory.”

— Arthur Golden

5. “Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.”

— Arthur Golden

6. “Adversity is like a strong wind. I don’t mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.”

— Arthur Golden

7. “My mother once told me I was like water. Water can carve its way even through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.”

— Arthur Golden

8. “We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.”

— Arthur Golden

9. “After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.”

— Arthur Golden

10. “If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.”

— Arthur Golden

11. “Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.”

— Arthur Golden

12. “I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon.”

— Arthur Golden

13. “Can’t you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.”

— Arthur Golden

14. “He was like a song I’d heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.”

— Arthur Golden

15. “This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.”

— Arthur Golden

16. “If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even a stone can be worn down with enough rain.”

— Arthur Golden

17. “Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.”

— Arthur Golden

18. “Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.”

— Arthur Golden

19. “We none of us find as much kindness in this world as we should.”

— Arthur Golden

20. “We don’t become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.”

— Arthur Golden

21. “Neither you nor I can know your destiny. You may never know it! Destiny isn’t always like a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it’s nothing more than struggling through life from day to day.”

— Arthur Golden

22. “Anyone can have a good day. The question is what do you do on a bad day. That’s when you’re being tested. In a very tangible sense, a bad day shows your innermost essence more than a good day.”

— Arthur Golden

23. “Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.”

— Arthur Golden

24. “Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.”

— Arthur Golden

25. “We can never flee the misery that is within us.”

— Arthur Golden

26. “Those of us with water in our personalities don’t pick where we’ll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us.”

— Arthur Golden

27. “Every man has his destiny. But who needs to go to a fortune-teller to find it? Do I go to a chef to find out if I’m hungry?”

— Arthur Golden

28. “By the time we arrived, as evening was approaching, I felt as sore as a rock must feel when the waterfall has pounded on it all day long.”

— Arthur Golden

29. “I don’t know when we’ll see each other again or what the world will be like when we do. We may both have seen many horrible things. But I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.”

— Arthur Golden

30. “She paints her face to hide her face. Her eyes are deep water. It is not for Geisha to want. It is not for geisha to feel. Geisha is an artist of the floating world. She dances, she sings. She entertains you, whatever you want. The rest is shadows, the rest is secret.”

— Arthur Golden

31. “Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.”

— Arthur Golden

32. “I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.”

— Arthur Golden

33. “Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?”

— Arthur Golden

34. “Nothing is as bleak as the future, except the past.”

— Arthur Golden

35. “A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.”

— Arthur Golden

36. “The prettiest of them all is a girl who is pretty on the inside.”

— Arthur Golden

37. “At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.”

— Arthur Golden

38. “Seeing him again after so long awakened something inside me. I was surprised to find myself feeling sad rather than joyful, as I would have imagined.”

— Arthur Golden

39. “I don’t think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.”

— Arthur Golden

40. “Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustn’t throw it away.”

— Arthur Golden

41. “It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.”

— Arthur Golden

42. “Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.”

— Arthur Golden

43. “We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.”

— Arthur Golden

44. “Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.”

— Arthur Golden

45. “Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by.”

— Arthur Golden

46. “A mouse who wishes to fool the cat doesn’t simply scamper out of its hole whenever it feels the slightest urge.”

— Arthur Golden

47. “Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that isn’t it.”

— Arthur Golden

48. “I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.”

— Arthur Golden

49. “An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them.”

— Arthur Golden

50. “I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you.”

— Arthur Golden