22 quotes
Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.
Oku no Hosomichi - The Narrow Road to the Interior (1702)
Seek not the paths of the ancients; Seek that which the ancients sought.
I am one
Who eats his breakfast,
Gazing at morning glories.
The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of.
Sick on a journey,
my dreams wander
the withered fields.
It was a rainy day when I crossed over the Hakone Barrier, and all the mountains were veiled in clouds.
He who creates three to five haiku poems during a lifetime is a haiku poet. He who attains to completes ten is a master.
The summer grasses—
For many brave warriors
The aftermath of dreams.
Oku no Hosomichi - The Narrow Road to the Interior (1702)
The old pond:
A frog jumps in,—
The sound of the water.
Even if you have three or four extra syllables—or as many as five or seven—you need not worry as long as the verse sounds right.
Summer grasses—
all that remains of great soldiers’
imperial dreams
Pitifully—under
a great soldier’s helmet,
a cricket sings
Spring passes
and the birds cry out—tears
in the eyes of fishes
Oku no Hosomichi - The Narrow Road to the Interior (1702)
How still it is!
Stinging into the stones,
The locusts' trill.
Oku no Hosomichi - The Narrow Road to the Interior (1702)
Even in Kyōto—
hearing the cuckoo's cry—
I long for Kyōto
Soon to die
yet showing no sign
the cicada's voice
I feel lonely as I gaze at the moon. I feel lonely as I think about myself, and I feel lonely as I ponder upon this wretched life of mine. I want to cry out that I am lonely, but no one asks me how I feel.
Basho: The Complete Haiku (2013)
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.
Robert Hass (1994)
The fact that Saigyō composed the poem that begins, "I shall be unhappy without loneliness," shows that he made loneliness his master. He also wrote:
In the mountain village
who are you calling, yobuko-bird?
I thought you lived alone.
Translation of David Young, Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times: Selected Haiku of Basho (2013)