Top 40 Murasaki Shikibu Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is more here than meets the eye.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

4. “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

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

7. “Autumn is no time to lie alone.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

8. “It is very easy to criticize others but far more difficult to put one’s own principles into practice, and it is when one forgets this truth, lauds oneself to the skies, treats everyone else as worthless, and generally despises others, that one’s own character is clearly revealed.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

9. “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

10. “Foolish indeed are those who trust to fortune.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

11. “It is in general the unexplored that attracts us...”

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

13. “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

14. “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

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

16. “Though the body moves, the soul may stay behind.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

19. “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

20. “Intimacy between stepchildren and stepparents is indeed proverbially difficult.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

21. “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

22. “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

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

24. “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

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

26. “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.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

31. “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

32. “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

33. “And among the leaves were white flowers with petals half-unfolded like the lips of people smiling at their own thoughts.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

34. “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

35. “How is it that a little incident like this suddenly comes back to one, whereas something that moved one deeply at the time can simply be forgotten with the passage of the years?”

— Murasaki Shikibu

36. “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.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

37. “There is a time for everything; and all people, but more especially women, should be constantly careful to watch circumstances, and not to air their accomplishments at a time when nobody cares for them. They should practise a sparing economy in displaying their learning and eloquence, and should even, if circumstances require, plead ignorance on subjects with which they are familiar.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

38. “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.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

41. “When the young Prince turned three, the court observed the ceremony of the donning of his first trousers.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

42. “It is very unkind of you to feel this way. Any woman should properly yield, it seems to me, even a complete stranger, because that is the way of the world... All I desire is solace from the flood of memories that overwhelms me.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

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

— Murasaki Shikibu

45. “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.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

46. “Nothing can be well learned that is not agreeable to one’s natural taste.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

47. “The monotony stirs many bitter recollections.”

— Murasaki Shikibu

48. “As Genji mused about the transitory nature of life, intense feelings of weariness and distaste for the world overwhelmed him. How much longer must he go on living in it now that he had been left behind?”

— Murasaki Shikibu