Don’t imitate me / we are not two halves / of a muskmelon.
MATSUO BASHOLearn the rules, and then forget them.
More Matsuo Basho Quotes
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Come out to view / the truth of flowers blooming / in poverty.
MATSUO BASHO -
Come, butterfly It’s late- We’ve miles to go together.
MATSUO BASHO -
From all these trees, in the salads, the soup, everywhere, cherry blossoms fall.
MATSUO BASHO -
From the pine tree, learn of the pine tree; And from the bamboo, of the bamboo.
MATSUO BASHO -
Farewell, my old fan. / Having scribbled on it, / What could I do but tear it / At the end of summer?
MATSUO BASHO -
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.
MATSUO BASHO -
Harvest moon: around the pond I wander and the night is gone.
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 -
Friends part forever wild geese lost in cloud.
MATSUO BASHO -
The fact that Saigyo composed a poem that begins, “I shall be unhappy without loneliness,” shows that he made loneliness his master.
MATSUO BASHO -
Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.
MATSUO BASHO -
Come, see the true flowers of this pained world.
MATSUO BASHO -
Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.
MATSUO BASHO -
Between our two lives there is also the life of the cherry blossom.
MATSUO BASHO -
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 BASHO