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A stroke of the sword that does not hit its target is the sword stroke of death; you reach over it to strike the winning blow. Your adversarys inititive having missed its mark, you turn the tables arround and get the jump on your adversary.
--
Quoted in "The book of family Traditions on the art of war"

 

Yagyu Munenori

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They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike.

 

Bartolome de Las Casas

 

The sword was odd. The Arab Movement was one: Feisal another (his name means a flashing sword): then there is the excluded notion, Garden of Eden touch: and the division meaning, like the sword in the bed of mixed sleeping, from the Morte d'Arthur. I don't know which was in your mind, but they all came to me — and the sword also means clean-ness, and death.

 

Thomas Edward (T. E.) Lawrence

 

There are various kinds of spirit involved in letting go the hilt.
There is the spirit of winning without a sword. There is also the spirit of holding the long sword but not winning. The various methods cannot be expressed in writing. You must train well.

 

Miyamoto Musashi

 

We are brutal with ourselves...., and one of the consequences this could have is that we will be equally brutal and cold with everyone else. Perhaps that's exactly what I've been missing.... A stroke of a sword, a well-aimed bullet must be less than what I feel when I think of being near you.

 

Gudrun Ensslin

 

Though they be
Ill rulers of this household, be not thou
Too swift to strike ere time be ripe to strike,
Nor then by darkling stroke, against them: I
Have erred, who thought by wrong to vanquish wrong,
To smite by violence violence, and by night
Put out the power of darkness: time shall bring
A better way than mine, if God's will be —
As how should God's will be not? — to redeem
Venice. I was not worthy — nor may man,
Till one as Christ shall come again, be found
Worthy to think, speak, strike, foresee, foretell,
The thought, the word, the stroke, the dawn, the day,
That verily and indeed shall bid the dead
Live, and this old dear land of all men's love
Arise and shine for ever: but if Christ
Came, haply such an one may come, and do
With hands and heart as pure as his a work
That priests themselves may mar not.

 

Algernon Charles Swinburne