Genzaburo Yoshino

I’m sure you know all this from reading How Many Things Have Human Beings Done? but still, there may be nothing more deep-rooted and stubborn than the human tendency to look at and think of things with themselves at the center.

And your heart, well, it opens only when you actually encounter a great work of art in person and it makes a deep impression on you. If it means anything at all to live in this world, it’s that you must live your life like a true human being and feel just what you feel. This is not something that anyone can teach from the sidelines, no matter how great a person they may be

So although there’s no doubt that everyone wants to avoid physical pain, in this sense, it’s something that we should be grateful for, something we need. Because of it, we know that a failure has occurred inside us, and at the same time, we also come to know exactly what the natural state of the human body should be.
In the same way, when a person is living in a way that’s not normal for a human being, suffering and hardships of the heart let us know that. So then, thanks to that pain and suffering, we can clearly grasp what a human being should naturally be

still, there may be nothing more deep-rooted and stubborn than the human tendency to look at and think of things with themselves at the center.

should go without saying that the true worth of a person doesn’t depend on that person’s clothes or house or food. No matter what kind of magnificent garments they wear or grand mansion they inhabit, fools are fools, boors are boorish, and their value as people shouldn’t be elevated for those reasons.

Copper! You have read both volumes of How Many Things Have Human Beings Done? You know the glorious history of human struggle. How for tens of thousands of years we piled effort upon effort to advance at last from our primitive life in ancient times to our current civilization.