Murasaki Shikibu Quotes

There is more here than meets the eye.

Foolish indeed are those who trust to fortune.

How much the more in judging of the human heart should we distrust all fashionable airs and graces, all tricks and smartness, learnt only to please the outward gaze

In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank whom the emperor loved more than any of the others. The grand ladies with high ambitions thought her a presumptuous upstart, and lesser ladies were still more resentful. Everything she did offended someone.

I wish you could understand me, but of course it is not the way of this world that we are ever completely understood.

Did not we vow that we would neither of us be either before or after the other even in travelling the last journey of life? And can you find it in your heart to leave me now?

Why do you grieve so uselessly? Every uncertainty is the result of a certainty. There is nothing in this world really to be lamented.

Well, we never expected this!" they all say. "No one liked her. They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous, and scornful. But when you meet her, she is strangely meek, a completely different person altogether!"
How embarrassing! Do they really look upon me as a dull thing, I wonder? But I am what I am.

Would that, like the smoke of the watch-fires that mounts and vanishes at random in the empty sky, the smouldering flame of passion could burn itself away

The monotony stirs many bitter recollections

When my brother, ... , was a young boy learning the Chinese classics, I was in the habit of listening with him and I became unusually proficient at understanding those passages that he found too difficult to grasp and memorize. Father a most learned man, was always regretting the fact: 'Just my luck!' he would say. 'What a pity she was not born a man!' But then I gradually realized that people were saying 'It's bad enough when a man flaunts his Chinese learning; she will come to no good,' and since I have avoided writing the simplest character.

Perhaps this was indeed the way so remarkably accomplished a man was destined to meet his end,' he replied, 'because two or three years ago he began looking very downcast and melancholy, and I often warned him, despite my own want of sense, that a man who sees too far into life and thinks about things too deeply becomes too detached from them and to be attractive and only loses whatever luster he may have had, but he seemed merely to find my opinion shallow.

What need have I for a palace? Rather to lie with you where the weeds grow thick.

To be pleasant, gentle, calm and self-possessed: this is the basis of good taste and charm in a woman. No matter how amorous or passionate you may be, as long as you are straightforward and refrain from causing others embarrassment, no one will mind. But women who are too vain and act pretentiously, to the extent that they make others feel uncomfortable, will themselves become the object of attention; and once that happens, people will find fault with whatever they say or do; whether it be how they enter a room, how they sit down, how they stand up or how they take their leave. Those who end up contradicting themselves and those who disparage their companions are also carefully watched and listened to all the more. As long as you are free from such faults, people will surely refrain from listening to tittle-tattle and will want to show you sympathy, if only for the sake of politeness.
I am of the opinion that when you intentionally cause hurt to another, or indeed if you do ill through mere thoughtless behavior, you fully deserve to be censured in public. Some people are so good-natured that they can still care for those who despise them, but I myself find it very difficult. Did the Buddha himself in all his compassion ever preach that one should simply ignore those who slander the Three Treasures? How in this sullied world of ours can those who are hard done by be expected to reciprocate in kind?

He felt her there beside him, just as she had always been on evenings like this when he had called for music, and when her touch on her instrument, or her least word to him, had been so much her own; except that he would have preferred even to this vivid dream her simple reality in the dark.

At a guess I see that you may indeed be he: the light silver dew brings to clothe in loveliness a twilight beauty flower.

In the mountains the cherry trees were in full bloom, and the farther he went, the lovelier the veils of mist became, until for him, whose rank so restricted travel that all this was new, the landscape became a source of wonder.

The world know it not; but you, Autumn, I confess it: your wind at night-fall stabs deep into my heart

The wood-carver can fashion whatever he will. Yet his products are but toys of the moment, to be glanced at in jest, not fashioned according to any precept or law. When times change, the carver too will change his style and make new trifles to hit the fancy of the passing day. But there is another kind of artist, who sets more soberly about his work, striving to give real beauty to the things which men actually use and to give to them the shape which tradition has ordained. This maker of real things must not for a moment be confused with the maker of idle toys.

Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams.

Let us be sure that the lady of our choice possesses certain tangible qualities that we admire; and if in other ways she falls short of our ideal, we must be patient and call to mind those qualities that first induced us to begin our courting.

The memories of long love gather like drifting snow, poignant as the mandarin ducks who float side by side in sleep.

Ceaseless as the interminable voices of the bell-cricket, all night till dawn my tears flow.

Nothing can be well learned that is not agreeable to one's natural taste.

She was gentle and sedate as usual, but evidently absent and preoccupied. Her eyes rested on the dew lying on the grass in the garden, and her ears were intent upon the melancholy singing of the autumn insects. It was as if we were in a real romance.

So much for their looks; but their characters - that is a much more difficult matter. We all have our quirks and no one is ever all bad. Then again, it is not possible for everyone to be all things all of the time: attractive, restrained, intelligent, tasteful and trustworthy. We are all different and it is often difficult to know on which aspect to dwell.

A woman who has nothing to recommend her is as rare as one who is perfect in every way.

It is in general the unexplored that attracts us ...

No penance can your hard heart find save such as you long since have taught me to endure

Though the body moves, the soul may stay behind.

Life is full of uncertainties, perhanps one day some unforeseen circumstance would bring her into his life once more

Old age is a disease from which there is no recovery but the old nun's recent attack had certainly been brought on chiefly by the fatigue of so much travelling.

There is much to be said for cherry blossoms, but they seem so flighty. They are so quick to run off and leave you. And then just when your regrets are the strongest the wisteria comes into bloom, and it blooms on into the summer. There is nothing quite like it. Even the color is somehow companionable and inviting.

How strange a thing is the heart of man!

No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly ... and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it.

When in my present lonely lot, I feel my past has not been free From sins which I remember not, I dread more, what to come, may be.

The bond between husband and wife is a strong one. Suppose the man had hunted her out and brought her back. The memory of her acts would still be there, and inevitably, sooner or later, it would be cause for rancor. When there are crises, incidents, a woman should try to overlook them, for better or for worse, and make the bond into something durable. The wounds will remain, with the woman and with the man, when there are crises such as I have described. It is very foolish for a woman to let a little dalliance upset her so much that she shows her resentment openly. He has his adventures--but if he has fond memories of their early days together, his and hers, she may be sure that she matters. A commotion means the end of everything. She should be quiet and generous, and when something comes up that quite properly arouses her resentment she should make it known by delicate hints. The man will feel guilty and with tactful guidance he will mend his ways. Too much lenience can make a woman seem charmingly docile and trusting, but it can also make her seem somewhat wanting in substance. We have had instances enough of boats abandoned to the winds and waves.
It may be difficult when someone you are especially fond of, someone beautiful and charming, has been guilty of an indiscretion, but magnanimity produces wonders. They may not always work, but generosity and reasonableness and patience do on the whole seem best.

You that in far-off countries of the sky can dwell secure, look back upon me here; for I am weary of this frail world's decay.

I leave you, to go the road we all must go. The road I would choose, if only I could, is the other.

Remember "the unmoored boat floats about.

Autumn is no time to lie alone

There are as many sorts of women as there are women.

Beauty without colour seems somehow to belong to another world.

Even those people who have no sorrow of their own often feel melancholy from the circumstances in which they are placed.

A night of endless dreams, inconsequent and wild, is this my life; none more worth telling than the rest.

In few people is discretion stronger than the desire to tell a good story.

People make a great deal of the flowers of spring and the leaves of autumn, but for me a night like this, with a clear moon shining on snow, is the best
and there is not a trace of color in it. I cannot describe the effect it has on me, weird and unearthly somehow. I do not understand people who find a winter evening forbidding.