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.
MATSUO BASHODon’t imitate me / we are not two halves / of a muskmelon.
More Matsuo Basho Quotes
-
-
Learn the rules, and then forget them.
MATSUO BASHO -
The journey itself is my home.
MATSUO BASHO -
Not to think of yourself / as someone who did not count — / Festival of the Souls.
MATSUO BASHO -
Summer grasses — all that remains of great soldiers’ imperial dreams.
MATSUO BASHO -
Nothing in the cry of cicadas suggests they are about to die.
MATSUO BASHO -
Winter garden, the moon thinned to a thread, insects singing.
MATSUO BASHO -
Awakened at midnight by the sound of the water jar cracking from the ice.
MATSUO BASHO -
Harvest moon: around the pond I wander and the night is gone.
MATSUO BASHO -
Old dark sleepy pool… Quick unexpected frog Goes plop! Watersplash!
MATSUO BASHO -
The sea darkens And a wild duck s call Is faintly white.
MATSUO BASHO -
The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of.
MATSUO BASHO -
Plunge Deep enough in order to see something that is hidden and glimmering.
MATSUO BASHO -
Old pond, leap-splash – a frog.
MATSUO BASHO -
I am one who eats breakfast gazing at morning glories.
MATSUO BASHO -
The basis of art is change in the universe.
MATSUO BASHO






