I never learned anything from a match that I won.

Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course - the space between your ears.

He who knows only victory and does not know defeat will suffer for it.

-- The founder of Japan's Tokugawa shogunate

Do not buy fertile fields for your children and grandchildren.

-- The charismatic giant who led Japan's Meiji Restoration through force of personality and moral authority

Governance must be clean and transparent.

-- The ruthlessly effective architect of modern Japan who built the Meiji state's institutions while his more charismatic peers took the glory

I was originally a commoner, tilling the fields at Nanyang.

-- The legendary chancellor and military strategist of the Shu Han kingdom during China's Three Kingdoms period

Let the boy win his spurs.

-- The greatest English military commander of the Hun

In God's name, the soldiers will fight and God will give the victory.

-- The peasant girl who reversed France's fortunes in the Hundred Years' War and was burned at the stake at age nineteen