Murasaki Shikibu Quotes

“Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“It is useless to talk with those who do not understand one and troublesome to talk with those who criticize from a feeling of superiority. Especially one-sided persons are troublesome. Few are accomplished in many arts and most cling narrowly to their own opinion.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

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.

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

“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.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“One ought not to be unkind to a woman merely on account of her plainness, any more than one had a right to take liberties with her merely because she was handsome”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“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.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“Autumn is no time to lie alone”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“If like the leaf of the wisteria through which the sun darts his rays transparently you give your heart to me, I will no longer distrust you”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“Your coldness serves to emphasize my own inadequacy, and makes me feel that the best solution might be to expire.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“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.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“Beauty without colour seems somehow to belong to another world.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“Now the end has come, and I am filled with sorrow that our ways must part: the path I would rather take is the one that leads to life.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“It is indeed in many ways more comfortable to belong to that section of society whose action are not publicly canvassed and discussed”

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

“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.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“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.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“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”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“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?”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“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.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

“The number of those who have nothing to recommend them and of those in whom nothing but good can be found is probably equal”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“If you are scorched earth, I will be warm rain.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“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”

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

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.

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

“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.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“My dwelling is but a rustic cottage, but still I should like you to see, at least, the pretty mountain streamlet which waters my garden.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

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.

— Murasaki Shikibu

“There is more here than meets the eye.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“Some ... have imagined that by arousing a baseless suspicion in the mind of the beloved we can revive a waning devotion. But this experiment is very dangerous. Those who recommend it are confident that so long as resentment is groundless one need only suffer it in silence and all will soon be well. I have observed however that this is by no means the case.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

Though the body moves, the soul may stay behind.

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

People who do not get into scrapes are a great deal less interesting than those who do.

— Murasaki Shikibu

“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.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“Foolish indeed are those who trust to fortune.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

“Who has told you that the fruit belies the flower? For the fruit you have not tasted, and the flower you know but by report.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

I have a theory of my own about what the art of the novel is, and how it came into being ... It happens because the storyteller's own experience ... has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

“How strange a thing is the heart of man!”

— Murasaki Shikibu

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.

— Murasaki Shikibu