Matsuo Basho Quotes

“On this road
where nobody else travels
autumn nightfall.”
― Matsuo Bashō

“静けさや
岩に染み入る
蝉の声

The deep Stillness
Seeping into the rocks
The voice of the Cicadas”
― Matsuo Bashō

“Ah, it is spring,
Great spring it is now,
Great, great spring -
Ah, Great -”
― Matsuo Bashō

“Here is a greedy man who keeps to himself
The beautiful pears ripe in his garden.”
― Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches

“A bush-warbler,
Coming to the verandah-edge,
Left its droppings
On the rice-cakes.”
― Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches

“There was a mild wind in the air, and one or two petals of cherry blossom were falling gently to the ground. It was the kind of day you often have in late March—so perfect that you want it to last for ever.”
― Noboyuki Yuasa

“In his poems and in his teaching of other poets, Bashō set forth a simple, deeply useful reminder: that if you see for yourself, hear for yourself, and enter deeply enough this seeing and hearing, all things will speak with and through you. “To learn about the pine tree,” he told his students, “go to the pine tree; to learn from the bamboo, study bamboo.” He found in every life and object an equal potential for insight and expansion. A good subject for haiku, he suggested, is a crow picking mud-snails from between a rice paddy’s plants. Seen truly, he taught, there is nothing that does not become a flower, a moon. “But unless things are seen with fresh eyes,” he added, “nothing’s worth writing down.”

A wanderer all his life both in body and spirit, Bashō concerned himself less with destination than with the quality of the traveller’s attention. A poem, he comments, only exists while it’s on the writing desk; by the time its ink has dried, it should be recognized as just a scrap of paper. In poetry as in
life, he saw each moment as gate-latch. Permeability mattered more in this process than product or will: “If we were to gain mastery over things, we would find their lives would vanish under us without a trace.”
― Jane Hirshfield