Top 104 Quotes & Sayings by Matsuo Basho
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Japanese poet Matsuo Basho.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
The moon is brighter since the barn burned.
The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.
There is nothing you can see that is not a Bashoflower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.
Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.
When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.
Without bitterest cold that penetrates to the very bone, how can plum blossoms send forth their fragrance all over the world?
The moon and sun are travelers through eternity. Even the years wander on. Whether drifting through life on a boat or climbing toward old age leading a horse, each day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.
Seek not the paths of the ancients;
Seek that which the ancients sought.
Come, see the true flowers of this pained world.
Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.
Year by year, the monkey's mask reveals the monkey
There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.
I hope to have gathered
To repay your kindness
The willow leaves
Scattered in the garden.
April's air stirs in Willow-leaves...a butterfly Floats and balances
Between our two lives there is also the life of the cherry blossom.
The desire to break the silence with constant human noise is, I believe, precisely an avoidance of the sacred terror of that divine encounter.
Old pond, frog jumps in - plop.
Don't imitate me / we are not two halves / of a muskmelon.
My body, now close to fifty years of age, has become an old tree that bears bitter peaches, a snail which has lost its shell, a bagworm separated from its bag; it drifts with the winds and clouds that know no destination. Morning and night I have eaten traveler's fare, and have held out for alms a pilgrim's wallet.
In this poor body, composed of one hundred bones and nine openings, is something called spirit, a flimsy curtain swept this way and that by the slightest breeze. It is spirit, such as it is, which led me to poetry, at first little more than a pastime, then the full business of my life. There have been times when my spirit, so dejected, almost gave up the quest, other times when it was proud, triumphant. So it has been from the very start, never finding peace with itself, always doubting the worth of what it makes.
When your consciousness has become ripe in true zazen-pure like clear water, like a serene mountain lake, not moved by any wind-then anything may serve as a medium for realization.
Winter garden, the moon thinned to a thread, insects singing.
What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that is has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry.
Go to the object. Leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Do not impose yourself on the object. Become one with the object. Plunge deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there.
Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.
Learn the rules, and then forget them.
A flute with no holes is not a flute.
No matter where your interest lies, you will not be able to accomplish anything unless you bring your deepest devotion to it.
How I long to see among dawn flowers, the face of God.
Operating superficially, the mind is random in its activity and stale in its insights and images. However, with practice and experience the mind is freed from the skull, and the fresh and new can appear as though for the first time. It
Every moment of life is the last, every poem is a death poem.
The oak tree:
not interested
in cherry blossoms.
The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of.
Why so scrawny, cat? Starving for fat fish or mice... Or backyard love?
From the pine tree, learn of the pine tree; And from the bamboo, of the bamboo
With every gust of wind, the butterfly changes its place on the willow.
The journey itself is my home.
Plunge Deep enough in order to see something that is hidden and glimmering.
Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo plant from a bamboo plant.
How much I desire! Inside my little satchel, the moon, and flowers
Year's end, all
corners of this
floating world, swept.
Summer grasses — all that remains of great soldiers' imperial dreams.
Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water.
Make the universe your companion, always bearing in mind the true nature of things-mountains and rivers, trees and grasses, and humanity-and enjoy the falling blossoms and the scattering leaves.
Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and you do not learn.
the universe and its beings are a complementarity of empty infinity, intimate interrelationships, and total uniqueness of each and every being.
A weathered skeleton
in windy fields of memory,
piercing like a knife.
I felt quite at home, / As if it were mine sleeping lazily / In this house of fresh air.
Nothing in the cry of cicadas suggests they are about to die
Friends part foreverwild geese lost in cloud
There came a day when the clouds drifting along with the wind aroused a wanderlust in me, and I set off on a journey to roam along the seashores
An autumn night - don’t think your life didn’t matter.
The basis of art is change in the universe.
Come out to view / the truth of flowers blooming / in poverty.
Learn how to listen as things speak for themselves.
Come, butterfly It's late- We've miles to go together.
Awakened at midnight by the sound of the water jar cracking from the ice
Traveler's heart. Never settled long in one place. Like a portable fire.
Orchidbreathing incense into butterfly's wings
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