Atomic Samurai Quotes

Samurai are born to die. Death is not a curse to be avoided -- but the natural end of all life. Death is not eternal . . . dishonor is.

All these years! All this time with us -- have you learned nothing?! You only live by the grace of our clan's tenet of forgiveness! Your judgement is shit! Rectitude is the bone that gives firmness and stature. Without decency, neither talent nor learning can make the human frame into a samurai.

the new theory of matter has entirely over thrown the old conception of the unchanging atoms, and they are now regarded to be composed of magnetic forces, ions, and corpuscles in incessant motion. Therefore we have no inert matter in the concrete, no unchanging thing in the sphere of experience, no constant organism in the transient universe.

I cannot imagine the simple chemical and physical forces without attributing the movement of material particles to conscious sensation." The same author says again: "We may ascribe the feeling of pleasure and pain to all atoms, and so explain the electric affinity in chemistry." 12.

As we men live and act, so do our arteries; so does blood; so do corpuscles. As cells and protoplasm live and act, so do elements, molecules, and atoms. As elements and atoms live and act, so do clouds; so does the earth; so does the ocean, the Milky Way, and the Solar System. What is this life which pervades the grandest as well as the minutest works of Nature, and which may fitly be said 'greater than the greatest and smaller than the smallest?' It cannot be defined. It cannot be subjected to exact analysis. But it is directly experienced and recognized within us, just as the beauty of the rose is to be perceived and enjoyed, but not reduced to exact analysis. At any rate, it is something stirring, moving, acting and reacting continually. This something which can be experienced and felt and enjoyed directly by every one of us. This life of living principle in the microcosmos is identical with that of the macrocosmos, and the Universal Life of the macrocosmos is the common source of all lives.

Few people now reflect that samurai swords killed more people in WWII that atomic bombs. WWII veteran Paul Fussell wrote, "The degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific War. Marine veteran and historian William Manchester wrote, "You think of the lives which would have been lost in an invasion of Japan's home islands--a staggering number of Americans but millions more of Japanese--and you thank god for the atomic bomb." Winston Churchill told Parliament that the people who preferred invasion to dropping the atomic bomb seemed to have "no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves.

the great is beyond ten feet square, the small enters the tiniest atom.

Takashi’s mother and father taught their small children spartan axioms of the samurai. There was, for instance, the famous Kei Setsu Ko. This sentence consists of just three ideographs, “firefly”, “snow” and “success”, and is an example of the one-line poems that Chinese and Japanese love. The image evoked is of an impoverished scholar in a hut with no money to fuel a lantern or buy a candle. His passion for study is so intense that each night he heaps snow by his desk and fills his room with netted fireflies. Their tiny glow and the moonlight reflected from the snow enable him to read his texts. Material poverty must never stop you. Another axiom that Takashi learned from his parents goes: A lioness rears the cubs that climb back up the bank.

He asked for a brush and Chinese ink for his jisei no uta, the traditional farewell song. From ancient times, in the code of bushido, the true samurai dies calm and self-possessed, leaving a farewell poem for his family and friends, often saluting the beauties of nature around him.