Yamamoto Tsunetomo Quotes

Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind.

Most men have at least one redeeming feature. Finding one for Brother Rike requires a stretch. Is 'big' a redeeming feature?

Wisdom is better than weapons of war; but one sinner destroyeth much good.

If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.

Being in humaneness is good. If we select other goodness and thus are far apart from humaneness, how can we be the wise?

Cultivate truth, good faith, experience, cleverness, sociability, and industry.

The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities, and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.

Every person has some splendid traits and if we confine our contacts so as to bring those traits into action, there is no need of ever being bored or irritated or indignant.

Let him leave the imperial court, who wishes to be virtuous. Virtue and absolute power cannot coexist.

The Art of Peace is based on four Great Virtues: Bravery, Wisdom, Love, and Friendship, symbolized by Fire, Heaven, Earth, and Water.

A good man prefers to suffer rather than overcome injustice with evil.

No one is wise or safe, but they that are honest.

The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one's virtues.

Above all things, lose no occasion of exercising your dispositions to be grateful, to be generous, to be charitable, to be humane, to be true, just, firm, orderly, courageous, etc. Consider every act of this kind as an exercise which will strengthen your moral faculties and increase your worth.

I'm very interested in why we do good things, or bad things, and where moral judgments come from.

What we take for virtue is often but an assemblage of various ambitions and activities that chance, or our own astuteness, have arranged in a certain manner; and it is not always out of courage or purity that men are brave, and women chaste.

When men are inhuman, take care not to feel towards them as they do towards other humans.

We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.

There are three things which the superior man guards against. In youth ... lust. When he is strong ... quarrelsomeness. When he is old ... covetousness.

There are three things against which the wise man guards: lust when young, quarrels when strong, and covetousness when old.

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

Honor's a thing too subtle for wisdom; if honor lie in eating, he's right honorable.

Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.