Sublime

the perfect officer wasn’t armed the perfect warrior wasn’t angry the perfect victor wasn’t hostile the perfect commander acted humble this is the virtue of nonaggression this is using the strength of others this is uniting with Heaven which was the ancient end

The great Stoic Marcus Aurelius once admonished himself to be a “boxer, not a fencer.” A fencer, he said, has to bend down to pick up his weapon. A boxer’s weapon is a part of him—“all he has to do is clench his fist.”

HUANG YUAN-CHI says, “Those who cultivate the Way should act with humility and harmony. The slightest carelessness, any action at all, can destroy everything. Those who cultivate Virtue look to themselves for the truth, not to the words of others. For those who understand that what moves them is also the source of their lives, the pill of immortali

“When a warrior fights not for himself, but for his brothers, when his most passionately sought goal is neither glory nor his own life’s preservation, but to spend his substance for them, his comrades, not to abandon them, not to prove unworthy of them, then his heart truly has achieved contempt for death, and with that he transcends himself and hi

Im ba l’hargekha, hashkem l’hargo If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first. —TALMUDIC EDICT

“Because a warrior carries helmet and breastplate for his own protection, but his shield for the safety of the whole line.”

É admirável a firmeza de seus combates, que sempre terminam em morte e efusão de sangue, pois eles não sabem o que é fuga e pavor. Cada um traz como troféu a cabeça do inimigo trucidado e a pendura à entrada de sua casa.

WANG CHEN, paraphrasing Suntzu Pingfa (2.1), says, “To raise an army of a hundred thousand requires the daily expenditure of a thousand ounces of gold. And an army of a hundred thousand means a million refugees on the road. Also, nothing results in greater droughts, plagues, or famines than the scourge of warfare. A good general wins only when he h