Top 500 Haruki Murakami Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don’t want to do?”

— Haruki Murakami

152. “Loving another person is a wonderful thing, and if that love is sincere, no one ends up tossed into a labyrinth. You have to have more faith in yourself.”

— Haruki Murakami

153. “I think I’ll stay alive here a bit longer, and see with my own eyes what’s going to happen. I can still die after that – it won’t be too late. Probably.”

— Haruki Murakami

154. “Please remember: things are not what they seem.”

— Haruki Murakami

155. “I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn’t have to write for my living.”

— Haruki Murakami

156. “So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little.”

— Haruki Murakami

157. “Each individual has their own unique color, which shines faintly around the contours of their body. Like a halo. Or a backlight. I’m able to see those colors clearly.”

— Haruki Murakami

158. “It’s hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.”

— Haruki Murakami

159. “Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of it. By living our lives, we nurture death.”

— Haruki Murakami

160. “I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt but I was wrong.”

— Haruki Murakami

161. “So many dreams, so many disappointments, so many promises. And in the end, they all just vanish.”

— Haruki Murakami

162. “Have you ever had that feeling – that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”

— Haruki Murakami

163. “Even if we could turn back, we’d probably never end up where we started.”

— Haruki Murakami

164. “Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.”

— Haruki Murakami

165. “Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.”

— Haruki Murakami

166. “Inside that darkness, i saw rain falling on the sea. Rain softly falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it. The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don’t know it is raining.”

— Haruki Murakami

167. “Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”

— Haruki Murakami

168. “Find me now. Before someone else does.”

— Haruki Murakami

169. “A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.”

— Haruki Murakami

170. “Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time.”

— Haruki Murakami

171. “Don’t pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life, and it’d lose even its imperfection.”

— Haruki Murakami

172. “There are many things we only see clearly in retrospect.”

— Haruki Murakami

173. “It seemed to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.”

— Haruki Murakami

174. “Life: I’ll never understand it.”

— Haruki Murakami

175. “Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.”

— Haruki Murakami

176. “I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.”

— Haruki Murakami

177. “Where there is light, there must be shadow, and where there is shadow there must be light. There is no shadow without light and no light without shadow.”

— Haruki Murakami

178. “If you’re young and talented, it’s like you have wings.”

— Haruki Murakami

179. “Life is not like water. Things in life don’t necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.”

— Haruki Murakami

180. “What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real.”

— Haruki Murakami

181. “I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.”

— Haruki Murakami

182. “We’re all kind of weird and twisted and drowning.”

— Haruki Murakami

183. “Long after the firefly had disappeared, the trail of its light remained inside me, its pale, faint glow hovering on and on in the thick darkness behind my eyelids like a lost soul. More than once I tried stretching my hand out in the dark. My fingers touched nothing. The faint glow remained, just beyond my grasp.”

— Haruki Murakami

184. “In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion.”

— Haruki Murakami

185. “You got to know your limits. Once is enough, but you got to learn. A little caution never hurt anyone. A good woodsman has only one scar on him. No more, no less.”

— Haruki Murakami

186. “It’s like a kid standing at the window watching the rain.”

— Haruki Murakami

187. “At least he never walked.”

— Haruki Murakami

188. “I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she’s gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.”

— Haruki Murakami

189. “I am a flawed human being – a far more flawed human being than you realize.”

— Haruki Murakami

190. “Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut.”

— Haruki Murakami

191. “Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life.”

— Haruki Murakami

192. “My grandpa always said asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime.”

— Haruki Murakami

193. “This life is nothing but a short, painful dream.”

— Haruki Murakami

194. “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.”

— Haruki Murakami

195. “Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I’m made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.”

— Haruki Murakami

196. “By then running had entered the realm of the metaphysical. First there came the action of running, and accompanying it there was this entity known as me. I run; therefore I am.”

— Haruki Murakami

197. “You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.”

— Haruki Murakami

198. “Once you start lying to the public, you have to keep lying. It never ends.”

— Haruki Murakami

199. “You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you.”

— Haruki Murakami

200. “There are ways of dying that don’t end in funerals. Types of death you can’t smell.”

— Haruki Murakami