The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.

Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed.

According to Eshin's Essentials of Salvation, the Ten Pleasures are but a drop in the ocean when compared to the joys of the Pure Land.

He had never looked forward to the wisdom and other vaunted benefits of old age. Would he be able to die young—and if possible free of all pain? A graceful death—as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table, slides unobtrusively down into the darkness of the floor beneath. A death marked by elegance.

Men had been living a proud life, having felt no need for the spirit-until Christianity invented it.

The mind, by its very nature, persistently tries to live forever, resisting age and attempting to give itself a form... . When a person passes his prime and his life begins to lose true vigor and charm, his mind starts functioning as if it were another form of life; it imitates what life does, eventually doing what life cannot do.

We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.