How Do You Live

Copper had an odd feeling. The watching self, the self being watched, and furthermore the self becoming conscious of all this, the self observing itself by itself, from afar, all those various selves overlapped in his heart, and suddenly he began to feel dizzy. In Copper’s chest something like a wave began to pitch and roll. No, it felt as if Copper himself were pitching and rolling.

Miyazaki makes films for whole people and makes films about consequences. When I worked on the English-language script of his film Princess Mononoke, I was astonished when I finally realised that everything in the film was about consequences of acts and actions: seemingly unrelated events are actually the consequences of other events or actions, and everyone in the film is acting according to what they believe to be their best interests without realising that what they do affects everyone else.

Still, I can become a good person. I can become a good person and create one good person for the world.
And I think that if I can just do that, then I might become a person who can create even more than that.

It’s hard to admit our mistakes. But in the pain of our mistakes there is also human greatness.

As we move through our lives as human beings, all of us, young and old, encounter sadness, hardship, and pain, each in our own way.
Of course, those are not things anyone ever wishes for. But it is thanks to sadness, hardship, and pain that we come to know what a true human being is.

If you think only of that one thing, you’ll never be able to change it, but if your regrets help you to really learn an essential thing about being human, that experience won’t have been wasted on you. Your life afterward, thanks to that, will be better and stronger than it was before. Jun’ichi, that’s the only way for a person to become great.

Napoleon believed that he could do whatever he had the power to do. And what’s more, he thought that he had to do those things in order to maintain his power.

I think that’s the most fantastic thing. People becoming more than people—”

“When I think how sometimes people can be brave enough to overcome any fear, any hardship, it gives me a feeling I can hardly describe. To charge right at the things that are painful and difficult, break through to the other side, and take pleasure in that—don’t you think that’s truly fantastic? The greater the suffering, the greater the joy in overcoming it.

Despite that, the sad truth is that in today’s world, the people who will be in the most trouble if they get hurt are the people who are in the greatest danger of getting hurt.