Echoes

Be detached from desire your whole life long.

You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Resolve your mental energy into abstraction, your physical energy into inaction. Allow yourself to fall in with the natural order of phenomena, without admitting the element of self,—and the empire will be governed.

The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror — going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing.

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try, the world is beyond the winning.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.

Happy is the man who hath the hour of his death always before his eyes, and daily prepareth himself to die.

Therefore, this terror of the mind and the darkness must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun or the bright light of day, but by the appearance and reasoning of nature.

O God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

He realized now that to be afraid of this death he was staring at with animal terror meant to be afraid of life. Fear of dying justified a limitless attachment to what is alive in man. And all those who had not made the gestures necessary to live their lives, all those who feared and exalted impotence — they were afraid of death because of the sanction it gave to a life in which they had not been involved. They had not lived enough, never having lived at all.

How easy it is to repel and to wipe away every impression which is troublesome or unsuitable, and immediately to be in all tranquility.

Forget the years, forget distinctions. Leap into the boundless and make it your home!

To the quiet mind all things are possible.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, "I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along." … You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

What I urge is that you so learn to control the machinery as to live with 'day-tight compartments' as the most certain way to ensure safety on the voyage. Touch a button and hear, at every level of your life, the iron doors shutting out the dead yesterdays and the unborn to-morrows.

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

The lion who breaks the enemy's ranks is a minor hero compared to the lion who overcomes himself.

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one's master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.

Nowhere you can go is more peaceful — more free of interruptions — than your own soul.

In pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.

God has given to man no sharper spur to victory than contempt of death.

The primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.