Top 100 Miyamoto Musashi Quotes
#1. The fact of the matter is that the world does not care about you or me, our hopes, our desires, or our dreams. And, the world of dreams, hopes, and desires that is constructed between our ears it is not necessarily a reflection of what is actually going on around us.
Miyamoto Musashi
#4. People in this world look at things mistakenly, and think that what they do not understand must be the void. This is not the true void. It is bewilderment ...
Miyamoto Musashi
#5. There is timing in everything. Timing in strategy cannot be mastered without a great deal of practice.
Miyamoto Musashi
#6. No man is invincible, and therefore no man can fully understand that which would make him invincible. Even with complete and thorough study there is always the possibility of being defeated and although one may be expert in a particular form, mastery is something a man never stops seeking to attain.
Miyamoto Musashi
#7. Do not waste time idling or thinking after you have set your goals
Miyamoto Musashi
#8. What I call the void is where nothing exists. It is about things outside man's knowledge. Of course the void does not exist. By knowing what exist, you can know that which does not exist. That is the void.
Miyamoto Musashi
#9. This is a truth: when you sacrifice your life, you must make fullest use of your weaponry. It is false not to do so, and to die with a weapon yet undrawn.
Miyamoto Musashi
#10. All man are the same except for their belief in their own selves, regardless of what others may think of them
Miyamoto Musashi
#11. You should not have any special fondness for a particular weapon, or anything else, for that matter. Too much is the same as not enough. Without imitating anyone else, you should have as much weaponry as suits you.
Miyamoto Musashi
#12. It may seem difficult at first, but everything is difficult at first.
Miyamoto Musashi
#13. It is difficult to realize the true Way just through sword-fencing. Know the smallest things and the biggest things, the shallowest things and the deepest things.
Miyamoto Musashi
#15. Becoming the opponent means you should put yourself in an opponent's place and think from the opponent's point of view.
Miyamoto Musashi
#16. When you have attained the way of strategy there will be nothing that you cannot understand. You will see the way in everything.
Miyamoto Musashi
#17. As if with the nut and flower, the nut has become less than the flower ... both those teaching and those learning are concerned with colouring and showing off their technique, trying to hasten the bloom of the flower.
Miyamoto Musashi
#18. Approach the enemy with the attitude of defeating him without delay.
Miyamoto Musashi
#20. A man cannot understand the art he is studying if he only looks for the end result without taking the time to delve deeply into the reasoning of the study.
Miyamoto Musashi
#22. The sword has to be more than a simple weapon; it has to be an answer to life's questions.
Miyamoto Musashi
#23. Crossing at a ford occurs often in a man's lifetime. It means setting sail even though your friends stay in harbour, knowing the route, knowing the soundness of your ship and the favour of the day.
Miyamoto Musashi
#24. In strategy it is necessary to treat training as part of normal life with your spirit unchanging.
Miyamoto Musashi
#25. In battle, if you you make your opponent flinch, you have already won.
Miyamoto Musashi
#26. It is difficult to understand the universe if you only study one planet
Miyamoto Musashi
#27. The important thing in strategy is to suppress the enemy's useful actions but allow his useless actions
Miyamoto Musashi
#28. When in a fight to the death, one wants to employ all one's weapons to the utmost. I must say that to die with one's sword still sheathed is most regrettable.
Miyamoto Musashi
#29. In contests of strategy it is bad to be led about by the enemy. You must always be able to lead the enemy about.
Miyamoto Musashi
#30. A thousand days of training to develop, ten thousand days of training to polish. You must examine all this well.
Miyamoto Musashi
#31. When you decide to attack, keep calm and dash in quickly, forestalling the enemy ... attack with a feeling of constantly crushing the enemy, from first to last.
Miyamoto Musashi
#32. To cut and to 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. Even if you slash strongly, and even if the enemy dies instantly, it is slashing. When you cut, your spirit is resolved.
Miyamoto Musashi
#33. Being like a rock wall" is when a master of martial arts suddenly becomes like a rock wall, inaccessible to anything at all, immovable.
Miyamoto Musashi
#35. You should not have a favourite weapon. To become over-familiar with one weapon is as much a fault as not knowing it sufficiently well.
Miyamoto Musashi
#36. Do not let your spirit be influenced by your body, or your body be influenced by your spirit. Be neither insufficiently spirited or over spirited. An elevated spirit is weak and a low spirit is weak. Do not let the enemy see your spirit.
Miyamoto Musashi
#37. This is truth: When you sacrifice your life, you must make fullest use of your weaponry. It is false not to do so, and to die with a weapon as yet undrawn.
Miyamoto Musashi
#40. The only reason a warrior is alive is to fight, and the only reason a warrior fights is to win
Miyamoto Musashi
#41. True warriors are fierce because their training is fierce.
Miyamoto Musashi
#42. If you wish to control others you must first control yourself
Miyamoto Musashi
#43. The path that leads to truth is littered with the bodies of the ignorant.
Miyamoto Musashi
#45. 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.
Miyamoto Musashi
#46. Whatever your determination or will power, it is foolish to try to change the nature of things. Things work the way they do because that is the way of things
Miyamoto Musashi
#47. In sum, it is not good to let the hand or the sword become fixed or frozen.87 A fixed hand is a dead hand; a hand that does not become fixed is alive. It is necessary to master this well.
Miyamoto Musashi
#49. A bullet from a gun does not make a distinction between practice and combat. You are training to be one and the same way in your life
Miyamoto Musashi
#50. You win battles by knowing the enemy's timing, and using a timing which the enemy does not expect.
Miyamoto Musashi
#51. You must cultivate your wisdom and spirit. Polish your wisdom: learn public justice, distinguish between good and evil, study the Ways of different arts one by one. When you cannot be deceived by men you will have realized the wisdom of strategy.
Miyamoto Musashi
#53. 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 Musashi
#54. Always return your weapon along the same path it traveled out on. In this way you can use it again without having to relocate and rethink our attitude.
Miyamoto Musashi
#55. The Way is in training ... Do nothing which is not of value.
Miyamoto Musashi
#56. To win any battle, you must fight as if you are already dead
Miyamoto Musashi
#57. When your opponent is hurrying recklessly, you must act contrarily and keep calm. You must not be influenced by the opponent.
Miyamoto Musashi
#58. Fixation is the way to death. Fluidity is the way to life.
Miyamoto Musashi
#59. From inside fortifications, the gun has no equal among weapons. It is the supreme weapon on the field before the ranks clash, but once swords are crossed the gun becomes useless.
Miyamoto Musashi
#60. Anger. Control your anger. If you hold anger toward others, they have control over you.Your opponent can dominate and defeat you if you allow him to get you irritated.
Miyamoto Musashi
#61. It is imperative to master the principles of the art of war and learn to be unmoved in mind even in the heat of the battle.
Miyamoto Musashi
#62. Nobody is strong and nobody is weak if he conceives of the body, from the head to the sole of the foot, as a unity in which a living mind circulates everywhere equally.
Miyamoto Musashi
#63. Develop intuitive judgement and understanding for everything.
Miyamoto Musashi
#64. When you attack the enemy, your spirit must go to the extent of pulling the stakes out of a wall and using them as spears and halberds.
Miyamoto Musashi
#65. Cutting down the enemy is the way of strategy, and there is no need for many refinements of it.
Miyamoto Musashi
#66. Do not sleep under a roof. Carry no money or food. Go alone to places frightening to the common brand of men. Become a criminal of purpose. Be put in jail, and extricate yourself by your own wisdom.
Miyamoto Musashi
#68. If you do not look at things on a large scale, it will be difficult to master strategy.
Miyamoto Musashi
#70. If you do not control the enemy, the enemy will control you
Miyamoto Musashi
#71. In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom has existence, principle has existence, the Way has existence, spirit is nothingness.
Miyamoto Musashi
#72. See to it that you temper yourself with one thousand days of practice, and refine yourself with ten thousand days of training.
Miyamoto Musashi
#74. Polish your wisdom: learn public justice, distinguish between good and evil, study the ways of different arts one by one.
Miyamoto Musashi
#75. The principle of my school is quite different. In the other schools, techniques are displayed like merchandise adorned with colors and flowers, so they can be turned into a way of making a living, which is not the true way.
Miyamoto Musashi
#76. Whatever the Way, the master of strategy does not appear fast ... .Of course, slowness is bad. Really skillful people never get out of time, and are always deliberate, and never appear busy.
Miyamoto Musashi
#77. Even if a man has no natural ability, he can be a warrior.
Miyamoto Musashi
#78. Fourthly, the way of the artisan. The way of the carpenter is to become proficient in the use of his tools, first to lay his plans with true measure and then perform his work according to plan. Thus he passes through life.
Miyamoto Musashi
#79. If the enemy thinks of the mountains, attack like the sea; and if he thinks of the sea, attack like the mountains.
Miyamoto Musashi
#80. In time, all things work to your advantage when you pursue them with an open heart.
Miyamoto Musashi
#81. Water adopts the shape of its receptacle, it is sometimes a trickle and sometimes a wild sea.
Miyamoto Musashi
#83. Speed is not part of the true Way of strategy. Speed implies that things seem fast or slow, according to whether or not they are in rhythm. Whatever the Way, the master of strategy does not appear fast.
Miyamoto Musashi
#84. Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is ...
Miyamoto Musashi
#86. With your spirit open and unconstricted, look at things from a high point of view.
Miyamoto Musashi
#87. It is necessary to know ten thousand things by knowing one well. If you are to practice the way of strategy, nothing must escape your eyes.54 Reflect well on this.
Miyamoto Musashi
#88. Do not think dishonestly ... Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters. Develop intuitive judgement and understanding for everything. Perceive those things which cannot be seen. Pay attention even to trifles. Do nothing which is of no use.
Miyamoto Musashi
#89. Also by training you will be able to freely control your own body, conquer men with your body, and with sufficient training you will be able to beat ten men with your spirit. When you have reached this point, will it not mean that you are invincible?
Miyamoto Musashi
#90. The halberd is inferior to the spear on the battlefield. With the spear you can take the initiative, the halberd is defensive.
Miyamoto Musashi
#91. To become the enemy, see yourself as the enemy of the enemy
Miyamoto Musashi
#92. Determine that today you will overcome your self of the day before, tomorrow you will win over those of lesser skill, and later you will win over those of greater skill.
Miyamoto Musashi
#93. The essential is to think that anything you are doing has to become the occasion for slashing. You must examine this well.
Miyamoto Musashi
#95. In strategy your spiritual bearing must not be any different from normal. Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased.
Miyamoto Musashi
#96. If you fail to take advantage of your enemies' collapse, they may recover.
Miyamoto Musashi
#97. By knowing what exist, you can know that which does not exist. That is the void. People in this world look at things mistakenly, and think that what they do not understand must be the void. This is not the true void. It is confusion.
Miyamoto Musashi
#98. When you appreciate the power of nature, knowing the rhythm of any situation, you will be able to hit the enemy naturally and strike naturally.
Miyamoto Musashi
#99. By knowing things that exist, you can know that which does not exist.
Miyamoto Musashi
#100. guard. It is in this sense that I recommend the guard without a guard. Whatever the situation is, you hold the sword so that you can slash your opponent.
Miyamoto Musashi
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