Matsuo Bashō Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

Matsuo Bashō
The rough sea
stretching out towards Sado
the Milky Way

Matsuo Bashō
A rough sea!
Stretched out over Sado
The Milky Way.

Matsuo Bashō
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

Matsuo Bashō
How pleasant—
just once not to see
Fuji through mist.

Matsuo Bashō
It rains during the morning. No visitors today. I feel lonely and amuse myself by writing at random. These are the words:
Who mourns makes grief his master.
Who drinks makes pleasure his master.

Matsuo Bashō
How much I desire! Inside my little satchel, the moon, and flowers

Matsuo Bashō
Days and months are travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by.

Matsuo Bashō
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 Bashō
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.

Matsuo Bashō
Between our two lives there is also the life of the cherry blossom.

Matsuo Bashō
The fact that Saigyo composed a poem that begins, "I shall be unhappy without loneliness," shows that he made loneliness his master.

Matsuo Bashō
He who creates three to five haiku poems during a lifetime is a haiku poet. He who attains to completes ten is a master.

Matsuo Bashō
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.

Matsuo Bashō
The universe and its beings are a complementarity of empty infinity, intimate interrelationships, and total uniqueness of each and every being.

Matsuo Bashō
Even a thatched hut
May change with a new owner
Into a doll's house

Matsuo Bashō
Clear cascades!
Into the waves scatter
Blue pine needles.

Matsuo Bashō
An old pond —
A frog leaping in—
The sound of water.

Matsuo Bashō
The white chrysanthemum Even when lifted to the eye Remains immaculate.

Matsuo Bashō
On a journey, ill,
And over fields all withered, dreams Go wandering still.

Matsuo Bashō
The months and days are the travelers of eternity. The years that come and go are also voyagers.... I too for years past have been stirred by the sight of a solitary cloud drifting with the wind to ceaseless thoughts of roaming.

Matsuo Bashō
Such stillness —
The cries of the cicadas
Sink into the rocks.

Matsuo Bashō