Li Bai quotes
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“From some home a jade flute sends dark notes drifting, Scattering on the spring wind that fills Lo-yang. Tonight, if we should hear the willow-breaking song, Who could help but long for the gardens of home?”
-- Li BaiSource : Li Po, “Spring Night In Lo-Yang Hearing A Flute”
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“From the walls of Baidi high in the coloured dawn To Jiangling by night-fall is three hundred miles, Yet monkeys are still calling on both banks behind me To my boat these ten thousand mountains away.”
-- Li BaiSource : Li Po, “Through The Yangzi Gorges”
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“All the birds have flown up and gone; A lonely cloud floats leisurely by. We never tire of looking at each other - Only the mountain and I.”
-- Li BaiSource : Li Po, “Alone Looking At The Mountain”
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“Now let you and me buy wine today! Why say we have not the price? My horse spotted with five flowers, My fur-coat worth a thousand pieces of gold, These I will take out, and call my boy To barter them for sweet wine. And with you twain, let me forget The sorrow of ten thousand ages!”
-- Li Bai -
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“The world is like a great empty dream. Why should one toil away one's life?”
-- Li Bai -
“To wash and rinse our souls of their age-old sorrows,We drained a hundred jugs of wine.A splendid night it was . . . .In the clear moonlight we were loath to go to bed,But at last drunkenness overtook us;And we laid ourselves down on the empty mountain,The earth for pillow, and the great heaven for coverlet”
-- Li BaiSource : Li Po, “A Mountain Revelry”
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“You ask why I make my home n the mountain forest, and I smile, and am silent, and even my soul remains quiet: it lives in the other world which no one owns. The peach trees blossom, The water flows.”
-- Li Bai -
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“The autumn air is clear, The autumn moon is bright. Fallen leaves gather and scatter, The jackdaw perches and starts anew. We think of each other- when will we meet? This hour, this night, my feelings are hard.”
-- Li Bai -
“Bears, dragons, tempestuous on mountain and river, Startle the forest and make the heights tremble. Clouds darken beneath the darkness of rain, streams pale with a pallor of mist. The gods of Thunder and Lightning Shatter the whole range.”
-- Li Bai -
“Heaven is high, Earth Wide. Bitter between them flies my sorrow.”
-- Li Bai -
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“Beneath the blossoms with a pot of wine, No friends at hand, so I poured alone; I raised my cup to invite the moon, Turned to my shadow, and we became three.”
-- Li BaiSource : "Drinking Alone in the Midnight" (eighth cent.) (translation by Elling Eide)
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“Since Life is but a Dream, Why toil to no avail?”
-- Li BaiSource : "A Homily on Ideals in Life, Uttered in Springtime on Rising from a Drunken Slumber" (ca. 750)
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“Gently I stir a white feather fan, With open shirt sitting in a green wood. I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone; A wind from the pine-tree trickles on my bare head.”
-- Li BaiSource : Li Po, “Summer In The Mountains”
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“The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older.”
-- Li BaiSource : Ezra Pound, Bai Li (1917). “Lustra of Ezra Pound, with Earlier Poems”
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“The birds have vanished into the sky, and now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.”
-- Li Bai -
“You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain; I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care. As the peach-blossom flows down stream and is gone into the unknown, I have a world apart that is not among men.”
-- Li BaiSource : Li Po, “Green Mountain”
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