Murasaki Shikibu Quotes
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.
There is a tendency among men as well as women ... so soon as they have acquired a little knowledge of some kind, to want to display it to the best advantage.
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
People who do not get into scrapes are a great deal less interesting than those who do.
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
Ceaseless as the interminable voices of the bell-cricket, all night till dawn my tears flow.
A night of endless dreams, inconsequent and wild, is this my life; none more worth telling than the rest.
No penance can your hard heart find save such as you long since have taught me to endure
Stepmothers in books usually behave very spitefully towards the children entrusted to them. But he was now learning by his own experience that in real life this does not always happen.
The memories of long love gather like drifting snow, poignant as the mandarin ducks who float side by side in sleep.
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.
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.
It is indeed in many ways more comfortable to belong to that section of society whose action are not publicly canvassed and discussed
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.
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?
i wish you could understand me, but of course it is not the way of this world that we are ever completely understood.
You are here to remind me of someone I long for, and what is it you long for yourself? We must have been together in an earlier life, you and I.
The number of those who have nothing to recommend them and of those in whom nothing but good can be found is probably equal