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Engage in combat fully determined to die and you will be alive; wish to survive in the battle and you will surely meet death.
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Quoted in Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro; Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture (1970); p. 188
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Cited in Wisdom from Early Japan. The Samurai Archives. Retrieved on 2006-11-07.
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Cited in Storry, Richard (October 11, 1979). "Cult of the Sword". The New York Review of Books 26 (15). ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved on 2006-11-07. (Review of several books on the samurai of Japan.)
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Alternative: "Those who cling to life die, and those who defy death live."

 

Uesugi Kenshin

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One of your American authors put it so well. He said awakening is the death of your belief in injustice and tragedy. The end of the world for a caterpillar is a butterfly for the master. Death is resurrection. We're talking not about some resurrection that will happen but about one that is happening right now. If you would die to the past, if you would die to every minute, you would be the person who is fully alive, because a fully alive person is one who is full of death. We're always dying to things. We're always shedding everything in order to be fully alive and resurrected at every moment. The mystics, saints, and others make great efforts to wake people up. If they don't wake up, they're always going to have these other minor ills like hunger, wars, and violence. The greatest evil is sleeping people, ignorant people.

 

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I spit on my life.
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Living is a pretty grim joke, but a joke just the same. The entire function of man is to survive. The outermost limit of endeavour is creative work. Anything less is too close to simple survival until death happens along. So I am engaged in striving to maintain equilibrium sufficient to at least realize survival in a way to astound the gods. I turned the thing up so it's up to me to survive in a big way . . . Foolishly perhaps, but determined none the less, I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all books are destroyed.

 

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Just before the forecastle sunk, the remaining sailors determined to leave.
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