Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa Quotes

You are not mechanics, you are warriors. You have been trained, not to think, but to do.

Every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. There is a saying of the elders that goes, 'Step from under the eaves and you're a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is waiting.' This is not a matter of being careful. It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand.

This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai: if by setting one's heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. his whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.

Everyday should be a good day to die

The Spartan, smiting and spurning the wretched Helot, moves our disgust. But the same Spartan, calmly dressing his hair, and uttering his concise jests, on what the well knows to be his last day, in the pass of Thermopylae, is not to be contemplated without admiration.

Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.

A warrior does not beg for his life. ~Izuru Kira

Sweetie, she-warriors don"t scream. We wow our men with a look, tame them with a smile.

A warrior lives on his wars, whether offensive or defensive. And he suffers a collapse if he finds that his warring capacity is unwanted.

To be the best you have to forget partying and concentrate all your energies on the football.

Only the idea of death makes a warrior sufficiently detached so that he is capable of abandoning himself to anything. He knows his death is stalking him and won't give him time to cling to anything so he tries, without craving, all of everything.

There is no amount of money, time or energy too great to spend on our children. They are our angels, our future. In failing them, we are failing ourselves.

Without excuse and self-consideration of health or limb or life, true soldiers fight, live to fight, love the thickest of the fight, and die in the midst of it.

The Way of the warrior does not include other ways, such as Confucianism, Buddhism, certain traditions, artistic accomplishments, and dancing. But even though these are not part of the Way, if you know the Way broadly, you will see it in everything.

Bushido is all very well in its way, but it is no match for a 30-06.

Train hard, fight easy.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Man lives freely only by his readiness to die.

A Spartan woman, as she handed her son his shield, exhorted him saying, "As a warrior of Sparta come back with your shield or on it."

As an old soldier, I admit the cowardice: it's as universal as seasickness, and matters just as little.

A Bayonet's contrition is nothing to the dead.

A true warrior does not fight because he wishes to but because he has to. A man who yearns for war, a man who enjoys his killing, he is a brute and a monster. No matter how much glory he wins on the battlefield, that cannot erase the fact that he is no better than a rabid wolf who will turn on his friends and family as soon as his foes.

It is a principle of the art of war that one should simply lay down his life and strike. If one's opponent also does the same, it is a even match. Defeating one's opponent is then a matter of faith and destiny.

War's dirty little secret is that some men love it. I'm trying to unpack why, to look at what it means to be a hero in the context of 21st-century combat.

O Friends, be men, and let your hearts be strong And let no warrior in the heat of fight, Do what may bring him shame in others' eyes