Top 100 Musashi Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Musashi

#1. Musashi, who trained himself, became a master swordsman who was never defeated.

#2. 4 years earlier "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 yet undrawn." Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings.

Phillip W. Simpson

#3. If you learn indoor techniques, you will think narrowly and forget the true Way. Thus you will have difficulty in actual encounters.

Miyamoto Musashi

#4. All things entail rising and falling timing. You must be able to discern this.

Miyamoto Musashi

#5. The path that leads to truth is littered with the bodies of the ignorant.

Miyamoto Musashi

#6. If you wish to control others you must first control yourself

Miyamoto Musashi

#7. True warriors are fierce because their training is fierce.

Miyamoto Musashi

#8. The only reason a warrior is alive is to fight, and the only reason a warrior fights is to win

Miyamoto Musashi

#9. Respect the gods and buddhas, but never rely on them.

Miyamoto Musashi

#10. Too much is the same as not enough.

Miyamoto Musashi

#11. 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

#12. Do not let your opponent see your spirit

Miyamoto Musashi

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. Do not act following customary beliefs.

Miyamoto Musashi

#16. 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

#17. Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help

Miyamoto Musashi

#18. 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

#19. Consider yourself lightly; consider the world deeply.

Miyamoto Musashi

#20. The way is in training.

Miyamoto Musashi

#21. 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

#22. A thousand days of training to develop, ten thousand days of training to polish. You must examine all this well.

Miyamoto Musashi

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. The important thing in strategy is to suppress the enemy's useful actions but allow his useless actions

Miyamoto Musashi

#26. It is difficult to understand the universe if you only study one planet

Miyamoto Musashi

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. Second is the way of the merchant. The wine maker obtains his ingredients and puts them to use to make his living. The way of the merchant is always to live by taking profit.

Miyamoto Musashi

#31. You're safer out in the open than you are crouching in the woodshed listening for footsteps and going crazy.

Eiji Yoshikawa

#32. Fixation is the way to death. Fluidity is the way to life.

Miyamoto Musashi

#33. When you cannot be deceived by men you will have realised the wisdom of strategy.

Miyamoto Musashi

#34. Generally speaking, the Way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death.

Miyamoto Musashi

#35. When your opponent is hurrying recklessly, you must act contrarily and keep calm. You must not be influenced by the opponent.

Miyamoto Musashi

#36. To win any battle, you must fight as if you are already dead

Miyamoto Musashi

#37. Do not let the body be dragged along by mind nor the mind be dragged along by the body

Miyamoto Musashi

#38. The Way is in training ... Do nothing which is not of value.

Miyamoto Musashi

#39. 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

#40. One must make the warrior walk his everyday walk.

Miyamoto Musashi

#41. You can only fight the way you practice

Miyamoto Musashi

#42. In my school, no consideration is given to anything unreasonable; the heart of the matter is to use the power of the knowledge of martial arts to gain victory any way you can.

Miyamoto Musashi

#43. 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

#44. You win battles by knowing the enemy's timing, and using a timing which the enemy does not expect.

Miyamoto Musashi

#45. If a man chooses a certain Way and seems to have no particular talent for this Way, he can still become a master if he so chooses. By keeping at a particular form of study a man can attain perfection either in this life or the next (if a next life is believed in).

Miyamoto Musashi

#46. 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

#47. Pay attention even to life's trifles.

Miyamoto Musashi

#48. 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. 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

#50. A warrior has no confusion in his mind ... This is true emptiness.

Miyamoto Musashi

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. Why would you want to appear as one thing and be another? If you are a warrior then you are a warrior and if you are not a warrior then you are not a warrior. The Way of the warrior is the Way of the warrior. To be a warrior, look like a warrior and stand like a warrior. Do not be false to yourself.

Miyamoto Musashi

#54. If you know the way broadly you will see it in everything.

Miyamoto Musashi

#55. What is essential is to suddenly make a move totally unexpected by the opponent, pick up on the advantage of fright, and seize the victory right then and there.

Miyamoto Musashi

#56. 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

#57. It may seem difficult at first, but everything is difficult at first.

Miyamoto Musashi

#58. 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

#59. All man are the same except for their belief in their own selves, regardless of what others may think of them

Miyamoto Musashi

#60. If there is a Way involving the spirit of not being defeated, to help oneself and gain honour, it is the Way of Strategy.

Miyamoto Musashi

#61. Imitation is the surest form of flattery and failure. I am not interested with your talk about my ideas. I am more interested in your applying them to your life. If you do not, then you are essentially not in accord with your own mind.

Miyamoto Musashi

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. Do not waste time idling or thinking after you have set your goals

Miyamoto Musashi

#65. As far as Im concerned, I regret nothing.

Miyamoto Musashi

#66. There is timing in everything. Timing in strategy cannot be mastered without a great deal of practice.

Miyamoto Musashi

#67. 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

#68. Then you will come to see things in an all-encompassing sense and, taking the void as the Way, you will see the Way as void.

In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom exists, principle exists, the way exists. Spirit is Void.

Miyamoto Musashi

#69. The ultimate aim of martial arts is not having to use them

Miyamoto Musashi

#70. Do not regret what you have done

Miyamoto Musashi

#71. 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

#72. You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour.

Miyamoto Musashi

#73. There are many ways of understanding simple things, but generally the opposite is true for difficult ideas

Miyamoto Musashi

#74. Do nothing which is of no use

Miyamoto Musashi

#75. The true science of martial arts means practicing them in such a way that they will be useful at any time, and to teach them in such a way that they will be useful in all things.

Miyamoto Musashi

#76. Study strategy over the years and achieve the spirit of the warrior. Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men.

Miyamoto Musashi

#77. If the enemy stays spirited it is difficult to crush him.

Miyamoto Musashi

#78. In battle, if you you make your opponent flinch, you have already won.

Miyamoto Musashi

#79. Become acquainted with every art.

Miyamoto Musashi

#80. In strategy it is necessary to treat training as part of normal life with your spirit unchanging.

Miyamoto Musashi

#81. You must understand that there is more than one path to the top of the mountain

Miyamoto Musashi

#82. 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

#83. When your spirit is not in the least clouded, when the clouds of bewilderment clear away, there is the true void.

Miyamoto Musashi

#84. The sword has to be more than a simple weapon; it has to be an answer to life's questions.

Miyamoto Musashi

#85. Do nothing that is of no use

Miyamoto Musashi

#86. 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

#87. Never depart from the way of martial arts.

Miyamoto Musashi

#88. The spirit of defeating a man is the same for ten million men. The strategist makes small things into big things, like building a great Buddha from a one foot model.

Miyamoto Musashi

#89. Thirdly, the gentleman warrior, carrying the weaponry of his way. The way of the warrior is to master the virtue of his weapons. If a gentleman dislikes strategy he will not appreciate the benefit of weaponry, so must he not have a little taste for this?

Miyamoto Musashi

#90. Approach the enemy with the attitude of defeating him without delay.

Miyamoto Musashi

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. Fixed formation is bad. Study this well.

Miyamoto Musashi

#94. The warrior is different in that studying the Way of strategy is based on overcoming men

Miyamoto Musashi

#95. You seem to be under the misconception that if you perform one brave deed, that alone makes you a samurai. Well it doesn't! you let that one act of loyalty convince you of your righteousness. The more convinced you became, the more harm you caused yourself and everyone else.

Eiji Yoshikawa