a samurai is a total human being, whereas a man who is completely absorbed in his technical skill has degenerated into a ‘function’, one cog in a machine.

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

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

Suddenly the full long wail of a ship's horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room—a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale's back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming.

The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.

There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.

If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death No death may be called futile.