On Etiquette

"'The end of all etiquette is to so cultivate your mind that even when you are quietly seated, not the roughest ruffian can dare make onset on your person.'  It means, in other words, that by constant exercise in correct manners, one brings all the parts and faculties of his body into perfect order and into such harmony with itself and its environment as to express the mastery of spirit over the flesh."

-Inazo Nitobe, Bushido, the Soul of Japan

(Editor's note: Inazo Nitobe's book, now over a century old, has been a lifelong friend to many a martial artist; I treasure my old, yellowed hard-copy.  He was, however, a man of the modern era and, if I'm not mistaken, a Christian; hence the ease at which " the mastery of spirit over the flesh" flows into his communication of this point, in spite of how contradictory the idea of "spirit and flesh" as separate things are to many eastern philosophies, as well as that of the ubiquitous indigenous religions born of shamanism.  The point he makes here, my disagreements with his terminology notwithstanding,  is sound.)