Basho > Basho's Quotes

“Like a soldier, the carpenter sharpens his own tools. He carries his equipment in his tool box, and works under the direction of his foreman. He makes columns and girders with an axe, shapes floorboards and shelves with a plane, cuts fine openwork and bas reliefs accurately, giving as excellent a finish as his skill will allow. This is the craft of the carpenters. When the carpenter becomes skilled, he works efficiently and according to correct measures. When he has developed practical knowledge of all the skills of the craft, he can become a foreman himself.”
― Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy

“Let us consider humanity a biogram (the basic DNA blueprint of the human organism and its potentials) united with a logogram (this set of "conditioned verbal habits"). The biogram has not changed in several hundred thousand years; the logogram is different in each society.”
― Robert Shea, The Illuminatus! Trilogy

“Maneuvering with an army is advantageous; with an undisciplined multitude, most dangerous.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“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, The Book of Five Rings

“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, The Book of Five Rings: Miyamoto Musashi

“He'd been a successful soldier, as these things went; he'd generally been on the winning side, and had killed more of the enemy by good if dull tactics than his own men by bad but exciting ones.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“The new captain looked up. Oh, good grief, Vimes thought. It's bloody Rust this time round!
And it was indeed the Hon. Ronald Rust, the god's gift to the enemy, any enemy, and a walking encouragement to desertion.
The Rust family had produced great soldiers, by the undemanding standards of 'Deduct your own casualties from those of the enemy, and if the answer is a positive number, it was a glorious victory' school of applied warfare. But Rust's lack of any kind of military grasp was matched only by his high opinion of the talent he in fact possessed only in negative amounts.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“Long before they had ever met, I think this destiny awaited them. They were not like ships passing in the night. It wasn't like they didn't understand each other. They understood each other better than anyone else, and each was focused solely on the other.”
― Gen Urobuchi, 監視官 常守朱 1 [Kanshikan Akane Tsunemori]

“They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow