Top 50 Lafcadio Hearn Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “All good work is done the way ants do things: Little by little.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

2. “There are two methods for the literary study of any book – the first being the study of its thought and emotion; the second only that of its workmanship. A student of literature should study some of the Bible from both points of view.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

3. “To ancient Chinese fancy, the Milky Way was a luminous river, – the River of Heaven, – the Silver Stream.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

4. “For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one’s literary education very incomplete.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

5. “Woo the muse of the odd.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

6. “Any idealism is a proper subject for art.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

7. “A great many things which in times of lesser knowledge we imagined to be superstitious or useless, prove today on examination to have been of immense value to mankind.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

8. “Japanese affection is not uttered in words; it scarcely appears even in the tone of voice; it is chiefly shown in acts of exquisite courtesy and kindness.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

9. “It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

10. “The Shadow-maker shapes forever.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

11. “How sweet Japanese woman is! All the possibilities of the race for goodness seem to be concentrated in her.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

12. “The highest duty of the man is not to his father, but to his wife; and for the sake of that woman he abandons all other earthly ties, should any of these happen to interfere with that relation.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

13. “But what is after all the happiness of mere power? There is a greater happiness possible than to be lord of heaven and earth; that is the happiness of being truly loved.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

14. “Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

15. “But the history of the changes produced by a universal idea is not a history of changes in the individual, but of changes brought about by the successive efforts of millions of individuals in the course of many generations.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

16. “One thing is always wrong-always: to cause suffering in others for the purpose of gratifying one’s own pleasures; that is everlastingly wrong.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

17. “The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

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18. “It has been wisely observed by the greatest of modern thinkers that mankind has progressed more rapidly in every other respect than in morality.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

19. “At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

20. “In order to comprehend the beauty of a Japanese garden, it is necessary to understand – or at least to learn to understand – the beauty of stone.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

21. “No man can possibly know what life means, what the world means, until he has a child and loves it. And then the whole universe changes and nothing will ever again seem exactly as it seemed before.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

22. “The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

23. “But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

24. “Literary success of any enduring kind is made by refusing to do what publishers want, by refusing to write what the public wants, by refusing to accept any popular standard, by refusing to write anything to order.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

25. “There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry – the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

26. “Is woman a religion? Well, perhaps you will have the chance of judging for yourselves if you go to America. There you will find men treating women with just the same respect formerly accorded only to religious dignitaries or to great nobles.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

27. “There was very little suicide among the men of the North, because every man considered it his duty to get killed, not to kill himself; and to kill himself would have seemed cowardly, as implying fear of being killed by others.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

28. “Can we ever hope for a Natural History with colored plates that will show us how the world appears to the faceted eyes of a dragon-fly?”

— Lafcadio Hearn

29. “I an individual – an individual soul! Nay, I am a population – a population unthinkable for multitude, even by groups of a thousand millions! Generations of generations I am, aeons of aeons! Countless times the concourse now making me has been scattered, and mixed with other scattering. Of what concern, then, the next disintegration? Perhaps, after trillions of ages of burning in different dynasties of suns, the very best of me may come together again.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

30. “Broad tolerance in the matter of beliefs is necessarily a part of the new ethics.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

31. “Nature has no consolation for us. Out of her formlessness issues forms which return to formlessness, – – that is all. The plant becomes clay; the clay becomes a plant. When the plant turns to clay, what becomes of the vibration which was its life? Does it go on existing viewlessly, like the forces that shape spectres of frondage in the frost upon a window-pane?”

— Lafcadio Hearn

32. “The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

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33. “Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

34. “We owe more to our illusions than to our knowledge.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

35. “The Russian people have had literary spokesmen who for more than a generation have fascinated the European audience. The Japanese, on the other hand, have possessed no such national and universally recognized figures as Turgenieff or Tolstoy. They need an interpreter. It.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

36. “I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

37. “One of the great defects of English books printed in the last century is the want of an index.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

38. “The great principle of Western society is that competition rules here as it rules in everything else. The best man – that is to say, the strongest and cleverest – is likely to get the best woman, in the sense of the most beautiful person.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

39. “But I confess that “my mind to me a kingdom is” – not! Rather it is a fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than ever occurred in South America...”

— Lafcadio Hearn

40. “Of course, the simple explanation of the fact is that marriage is the most important act of man’s life in Europe or America, and that everything depends upon it.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

41. “The more you wish to be, the wiser you are; while the wish to have is apt to be foolish in proportion to its largeness.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

42. “Some persons have ventured to say that it is only since Englishmen ceased to believe in the Bible that they began to discover how beautiful it was.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

43. “Accordingly the Northern races of Europe found their inspiration in the Bible; and the enthusiasm for it has not yet quite faded away.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

44. “French novels generally treat of the relations of women to the world and to lovers, after marriage; consequently there is a great deal in French novels about adultery, about improper relations between the sexes, about many things which the English public would not allow.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

45. “In the world of reality the more beautiful a work of art, the longer, we may be sure, was the time required to make it, and the greater the number of different minds which assisted in its development.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

46. “As a result, the highly civilized man can endure incomparably more than the savage, whether of moral or physical strain. Being better able to control himself under all circumstances, he has a great advantage over the savage.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

47. “The poet or the story-teller who cannot give the reader a little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either a really great writer or a great thinker.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

48. “A proof of really great art is that it is generally true – it seldom falls into the misapprehensions to which minor art is liable.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

49. “It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found – indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.”

— Lafcadio Hearn

50. “The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature.”

— Lafcadio Hearn