If you want to learn the craft of war, ponder over this book. The teacher is as a needle, the disciple is as thread. You must practice constantly.
Miyamoto MusashiRead
You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour.
Interpretation
Maintaining one's honor is more important than physical existence.
Miyamoto Musashi, a legendary swordsman, emphasizes the significance of personal honor over the mere survival of the body. This quote suggests that one's reputation and moral integrity hold greater value than life itself, highlighting the warrior's code and the importance of living a life of principles and values.
In practice
During a commencement speech, a leader might use this quote to inspire graduates to uphold their values.
If you want to learn the craft of war, ponder over this book. The teacher is as a needle, the disciple is as thread. You must practice constantly.
If you fail to take advantage of your enemies' collapse, they may recover.
One must make the warrior walk his everyday walk.
To cut and slash are two different things. Cutting, whatever form of cutting it is, is decisive, with a resolute spirit. Slashing is nothing more than touching the enemy.
You win battles by knowing the enemy's timing, and using a timing which the enemy does not expect.
In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom has existence, principle has existence, the Way has existence, spirit is nothingness.
All the principles of heaven and earth are living inside you. Life itself is truth, and this will never change. Everything in heaven and earth breathes. Breath is the thread that ties creation together.
Do not take the agenda that someone else has mapped out for your life.
The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.
The ordinary method of education is to imprint ideas and opinions, in the strict sense of the word, prejudices, on the mind of the child, before it has had any but a very few particular observations. It is thus that he afterwards comes to view the world and gather experience through the medium of those ready-made ideas, rather than to let his ideas be formed for him out of his own experience of life, as they ought to be.
A tree is beautiful, but what's more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees. Forests create climate, climate influences peoples' character, and so on and so forth. There can be neither civilization nor happiness if forests crash down under the axe, if the climate is harsh and severe, if people are also harsh and severe. ... What a terrible future!
Only then does he realize what he has done to Mirabelle, how wanting a square inch of her and not all of her has damaged them both, and how he cannot justify his actions except that, well, it was life.
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