Matsuo Basho Quotes

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

Learn how to listen as things speak for themselves.

Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water.

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.

No matter where your interest lies, you will not be able to accomplish anything unless you bring your deepest devotion to it.

Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.

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.

Learn the rules, and then forget them.

Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.

The desire to break the silence with constant human noise is, I believe, precisely an avoidance of the sacred terror of that divine encounter.

There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.

A flute with no holes is not a flute.

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 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.

Come, butterfly It's late- We've miles to go together.

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.

Every moment of life is the last, every poem is a death poem.

Nothing in the cry of cicadas suggests they are about to die

Old pond, frog jumps in - plop.

Come, see the true flowers of this pained world.

The oak tree: not interested in cherry blossoms.

Traveler's heart. Never settled long in one place. Like a portable fire.

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

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.

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