Bai Juyi Quotes

Bai Juyi (772 AD-846 AD)

Bai Juyi, courtesy name Letian, was a renowned Chinese poet and Tang dynasty government official. Many of his poems concern his career or observations made about everyday life, including as governor of three different provinces. (Bai Juyi Quotes)

“A little child paddles a little boat,
Drifting about, and picking white lotuses.
He does not know how to hide his tracks,
And duckweed’s opened up along his path”
Bai Juyi

“A strip of water’s spread in the setting sun,
Half the river’s emerald, half is red.
I love the third night of the ninth month,
The dew is like a pearl; the moon like a bow”
Bai Juyi

“Autumn clouds, vague and obscure;
The evening, lonely and chill.
I felt the dampness on my garments,
But saw no spot, and heard no sound of rain”
Bai Juyi

“Blossom time, drunk together, banishing spring sorrow;
drunk, we broke off flowering limbs, counters for our rounds of wine.
Suddenly I remembered my old friend, gone to the edge of the sky:
by my reckoning, today he must have reached Liang-chou.”
Bai Juyi
The Selected Poems of Po Chü-I

“I have got wine, but I am too lazy to drink;
So it’s just the same as if my cup were empty.
I have got a lute, but am too lazy to play;
So it’s just the same as if it had no strings.”
Bai Juyi
The Selected Poems of Po Chü-I

“I wish we could be trees deep in the mountains,
to“uching, twining limb around limb.”
Bai Juyi
The Selected Poems of Po Chü-I

“It’s human nature to dote on young ones,
and people when they grow old get soft-hearted.
But the sweetest wine in the end turns sour,
the moon, however full, eventually must wane.”
Bai Juyi
The Selected Poems of Po Chü-I

“On the seventh day of the Seventh-month, in the Palace of Long Life,
We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight world
That we wished to fly in heaven, two birds with the wings of one,
And to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree.”
Earth endures, heaven endures; some time both shall end,
While this unending sorrow goes on and on for ever.”
Bai Juyi

“Sent as a present from Annam
A red cockatoo.
Coloured like the peach-tree blossom,
Speaking with the speech of men.
And they did to it what is always done
To the learned and eloquent.
They took a cage with stout bars
And shut it up inside.”
Bai Juyi

“SONG OF SUNSET ON THE RIVER
A strip of water’s spread in the setting sun,
Half the river’s emerald, half is red.
I love the third night of the ninth month,
The dew is like pearl; the moon like a bow.”
Bai Juyi

“Two monks sit facing, playing chess on the mountain,
The bamboo shadow on the board is dark and clear.
Not a person sees the bamboo’s shadow,
One sometimes hears the pieces being moved”
Bai Juyi