Top 160 James Clavell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Only by living at the edge of death can you understand the indescribable joy of life – Shogun.”

— James Clavell

2. “All stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending, and if they’re any good, the ending is a beginning.”

— James Clavell

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

3. “Patience means restraining yourself. There are seven emotions, Joy, anger, anxiety, adoration, grief, fear, and hate. If a man doesn’t give way to these, he’s patient. I’m not as strong as I might be but I’m patient.”

— James Clavell

Featured in: Strong Quotes

4. “The search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world, and the most dangerous.”

— James Clavell

5. “To think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral down into ever increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline and training is all about.”

— James Clavell

6. “The more I know, the more sure I am I know so little. The eternal paradox.”

— James Clavell

7. “What are clouds, but an excuse for the sky? What is life, but an escape from death?”

— James Clavell

8. “If you smile when you lose, then you win in life.”

— James Clavell

9. “Guard yourself and your conscience no one else will and know that a bad decision at the right time can destroy you far more surely than any bullet!”

— James Clavell

10. “There is no dignity for either the sufferer or the torturer.”

— James Clavell

11. “How beautiful life is and how sad! How fleeting, with no past and no future, only a limitless now.”

— James Clavell

12. “Love is a Christian word, Anjin-san. Love is a Christian thought, a Christian ideal. We have no word for ‘love’ as I understand you to mean it. Duty, loyalty, honor, respect, desire, those words and thoughts are what we have, all that we need.”

— James Clavell

13. “A man’s fate is a man’s fate and life is but an illusion.”

— James Clavell

14. “Christ, it’s so good to be alive.”

— James Clavell

15. “Listen, if you want peace you must learn to drink cha from an empty cup.”

— James Clavell

16. “It’s a saying they have, that a man has a false heart in his mouth for the world to see, another in his breast to show to his special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, which is never known to anyone except to himself alone, hidden only God knows where.”

— James Clavell

17. “God gives us intelligence to uncover the wonders of nature. Without the gift, nothing is possible.”

— James Clavell

18. “Karma is the beginning of knowledge. Next is patience. Patience is very important. The strong are the patient ones, Anjin-san. patience means holding back your inclination to the seven emotions: hate, adoration, joy, anxiety, anger, grief, fear. If you don’t give way to the seven, you’re patient, then you’ll soon understand all manner of things and be in harmony with Eternity.”

— James Clavell

19. “Kill, torture, burn! Just so long as it’s in the name of God, you’re all right. What a lot of hypocrisy! Don’t give me faith! It’s nothing!”

— James Clavell

20. “And Adam ruled, for he was the King. Until the day his will to be King deserted him. Then he died, food for a stronger. And the strongest was always the King, not by strength alone, but King by cunning and luck and strength together. Among the rats.”

— James Clavell

21. “Money means nothing to a real man.”

— James Clavell

22. “This sunset exists. Tomorrow does not exist. There is only now. Please look. It is so beautiful and it will never happen ever again, never, not this sunset, never in all infinity.”

— James Clavell

23. “In war and in peace, a good enemy can be more valuable than a good ally.”

— James Clavell

24. “Patience means holding back your inclination to the seven emotions: hate, adoration, joy, anxiety, anger, grief, fear. If you don’t give way to the seven, you’re patient, then you’ll soon understand all manner of things and be in harmony with Eternity.”

— James Clavell

25. “Where do the interests of the Christians lie?” “On the side of peace. Christianity is a religion, Sire, not a political ideology.”

— James Clavell

26. “Empires are built by young men, Culum. They’re lost by old men.”

— James Clavell

27. “Always remember, child,’ her first teacher had impressed on her, ’that to think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort.”

— James Clavell

28. “His eyes Were just the end Of Hell – All pain, Articulate.”

— James Clavell

29. “Why is it there is always such violence between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law? Doesn’t daughter-in-law, in time, become mother-in-law? Why does she then always treat her own daughter-in-law to a lashing tongue and make her life a misery, and why does that girl do the same in her turn? Doesn’t anyone learn?”

— James Clavell

30. “Ronin were landless or masterless peasant-soldiers or samurai who, through dishonor or the loss of their masters, were forced to wander the land until some other lord would accept their services.”

— James Clavell

31. “The earth’s round, like an orange, but this map is like its skin, cut off in ovals, north to south, laid flat and stretched a bit at the top and bottom. A Dutchman called Mercator invented the way to do this accurately twenty years ago. It’s the first accurate world map.”

— James Clavell

32. “Isn’t man but a blossom taken by wind, and only the mountains and the sea and the stars and this land of the gods everlasting?”

— James Clavell

33. “What you do with strangers is ignore them for. No second chance, no sorry I did it, never accept an apology, but never, ever get angry with strangers.”

— James Clavell

34. “All gods bear witness! The Jade Gate and the One-Eyed Monk are truly yin and yang, truly everlasting, truly godlike, both insatiable however much one consumes the other.”

— James Clavell

35. “Kogo, the goshawk, fluttered on his wrist and settled herself, watching him. Toranaga smiled at her. I did not choose to be what I am. It is my karma.”

— James Clavell

36. “It is sometimes wise to be abstract.”

— James Clavell

37. “The scarcity of years does not necessitate lack of wisdom.”

— James Clavell

38. “What is pain to a man? A privilege! Masking pain is the measure of a man.”

— James Clavell

39. “Anger is something you should only vent in front of intimates, and friends and relations. Never be angry in front of strangers because you lose face.”

— James Clavell

40. “It’s always important to take time to study men – important men. Friends and enemies.”

— James Clavell

41. “They put me with a blind monk who taught me how to massage and to see again with my fingers. Now my fingers tell me more than my eyes used to, I think.”

— James Clavell

42. “Anger is one of the most intimate of emotions and to expose it to strangers is one of the most stupid and sickening things to do. Never get angry with strangers because they are strangers.”

— James Clavell

43. “Beauty Is not less For falling In the breeze.”

— James Clavell

44. “Changi for me – of course it’s easy to be wise after the event, and to discuss it cleverly after the event – was about as near as you can get to being dead and still be alive.”

— James Clavell

45. “Death and life are the same thing. This is the immutable law of nature.”

— James Clavell

46. “You must learn to control the filth of your tongue, my son. It will send you to hell.”

— James Clavell

47. “Beyond the castle walls, the city lay in almost total darkness. Above, the moon was pallid and misted. It was a brooding, darkling night. And, it seemed to him, doom walked the heavens.”

— James Clavell

48. “But they’re as Communist as Russia. They went to war against us when we were only trying to protect freedom in South Korea. We weren’t going to attack them.”

— James Clavell

49. “Horses are far worse than men for treachery...”

— James Clavell

50. “Lend a little and you have a debtor – lend a lot and you have a partner!”

— James Clavell