Top 500 Haruki Murakami Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

203. “At least he never walked.”

— Haruki Murakami

204. “The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

206. “Killing time is not an easy job.”

— Haruki Murakami

207. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— Haruki Murakami

209. “Never let the darkness or negativity outside affect your inner self. Just wait until morning comes and the bright light will drown out the darkness.”

— Haruki Murakami

210. “No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.”

— Haruki Murakami

211. “Life is like a box of cookies.”

— Haruki Murakami

212. “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you start to think, Man this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself. This pretty much sums up the most important aspect of marathon running.”

— Haruki Murakami

213. “I’m a coward when it comes to matters of the heart. That is my fatal flaw.”

— Haruki Murakami

214. “Friends don’t need the intervention of a third party. Friendship’s a voluntary thing.”

— Haruki Murakami

215. “In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.”

— Haruki Murakami

216. “When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want.”

— Haruki Murakami

217. “I’m not so weird to me.”

— Haruki Murakami

218. “Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.”

— Haruki Murakami

219. “The moon had been observing the earth close-up longer than anyone. It must have witnessed all of the phenomena occurring – and all of the acts carried out – on this earth. But the moon remained silent; it told no stories.”

— Haruki Murakami

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

220. “There is some risk, of course. But risk is the spice of life.”

— Haruki Murakami

221. “When the fire goes out, you’ll start feeling the cold. You’ll wake up whether you want to or not.”

— Haruki Murakami

222. “What we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with.”

— Haruki Murakami

223. “A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else.”

— Haruki Murakami

224. “Like you’re riding a train at night across some vast plain, and you catch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In an instant it’s sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. But if you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, just barely for a few moments.”

— Haruki Murakami

225. “I wonder what ants do on rainy days?”

— Haruki Murakami

226. “You’ve already decided what you’re going to do, and all that’s left is to set the wheels in motion. I mean, it’s your life. Basically, you gotta go with what you think is right.”

— Haruki Murakami

227. “Among the many values in life, I appreciate freedom most.”

— Haruki Murakami

228. “I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do. To dream, to live in the world of dreams. But it doesn’t last forever. Wakefulness always comes to take me back.”

— Haruki Murakami

229. “The fresh smell of coffee soon wafted through the apartment, the smell that separates night from day.”

— Haruki Murakami

230. “What we needed were not words and promises but a steady accumulation of small realities.”

— Haruki Murakami

231. “Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work.”

— Haruki Murakami

Featured in: Reading Quotes

232. “Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you.”

— Haruki Murakami

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

233. “I’m just kinda tired. Like a monkey in the rain.”

— Haruki Murakami

234. “Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest.”

— Haruki Murakami

235. “But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.”

— Haruki Murakami

236. “No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.”

— Haruki Murakami

237. “It’s pretty thin, the wall separating healthy confidence and unhealthy Pride.”

— Haruki Murakami

238. “Listen up – there’s no war that will end all wars,’ Crow tells me. ‘War breeds war. Lapping up the blood shed by violence, feeding on wounded flesh. War is a perfect, self-contained being. You need to know that.”

— Haruki Murakami

239. “Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.”

— Haruki Murakami

240. “Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free?”

— Haruki Murakami

Featured in: Real Quotes

241. “Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all.”

— Haruki Murakami

242. “An unhealthy soul requires a healthy body.”

— Haruki Murakami

243. “I probably still haven’t completely adapted to the world. I don’t know, I feel like this isn’t the real world. The people, the scene: they just don’t seem real to me.”

— Haruki Murakami

Featured in: Real Quotes

244. “Besides being the world the kind of sadness that can not be expressed in tears. You can not explain it to anyone. Unable to take any shape, settles quietly in the bottom of the heart as snow during the windless night.”

— Haruki Murakami

245. “My point is: in this whole wide world the only person you can depend on is you.”

— Haruki Murakami

246. “Things pass us by. Nobody can catch them. That’s the way we live our lives.”

— Haruki Murakami

247. “Two-thirds of earth’s surface is ocean, and all we can see with the naked eye is the surface.”

— Haruki Murakami

248. “I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.”

— Haruki Murakami

249. “Music always stimulates my imagination. When I’m writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like.”

— Haruki Murakami

250. “Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads – at least that’s where I imagine it – there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.”

— Haruki Murakami