Masaoka Shiki

"Until now I had mistaken the "Enlightenment” of Zen: I was wrong to think it meant being able to die serenely under any conditions. It means being able to live serenely under any conditions."

"Take your materials from what is around you—if you see a dandelion, write about it; if it’s misty, write about the mist. The materials for poetry are all about you in profusion."

"柿くへば 鐘が鳴るなり 法隆寺 kaki kueba kane ga naru nari Hōryūji"

"Tell them I was a persimmon eater who liked haiku"

"... the sparrow’s chirp, the crow’s caw, the willow’s green, the cherry blossom’s pink, are the truth of the Zen master and the essence of Basho's style."

"In this jumbled world of ten thousand things, there are things that are beautiful, things that are ugly, and things that combine beauty and ugliness. However, if we attend to beauty, we can find almost nothing that completely lacks it. The ugly face of the puffer fish bears a slight trace of beauty within its ugliness. Sea cucumbers possess an unintelligible form, but even in this unintelligible form, we catch a glimpse of beauty. People despise the creepy appearance of hairy caterpillars and snakes, yet an honest look may reveal something appealing about them. But of all these subjects, the most extreme example must be shit. Among countless books on aesthetics, probably not a single one expounds on its beauty. There are voluminous Western and Chinese poems, but in our experience, we have never run into a poem about shit. Probably such a poem does not exist even in books of which we are not aware. If this is the case, then we might regard shit as entirely unsuitable for poetry; but, curiously, there are many poems about shit in haiku."

"Haiku in particular allows poets to depict the insignificant things that other poetic forms cannot, given the natural tendency of a haiku poet’s observations to encompass every inch of the world. Taken to the extreme, the haiku poet cannot dismiss even excrement."

"In his later, bedridden years his observations were limited almost entirely to his sickroom and the small garden that adjoined it, yet he continued until the very end to draw artistic inspiration from the few flowers, plants, and other objects that were within his field of vision. Or he wrote about the foods he enjoyed, particularly such fruits as persimmons, since eating was one of the few physical pleasures that his ailment had not deprived him of."