初心忘る可からず shoshin wasurubekarazu Never Lose Your Beginner's Spirit

初心忘る可からず carries two senses. In the source it is a master's rule: there is a beginning at every stage of a life, and the last of them is old age. The dictionaries give a general sense, advice to beginners to keep the humility they started with. The last word is written with 可 standing for the syllable べ, since 可 is read べし in the Japanese reading of Chinese. Whether it is for a first year of training or the fortieth is yours.

Zeami wrote the line in 1424 at the close of his treatise 花鏡, The Mirror of the Flower, naming it the one maxim his school held good in every art and dividing it in three; his earlier 風姿花伝 already says 初心を忘れず and, in a section dated 1418, 初心ヲ忘ルベカラズ, and the treatises lay unpublished until 1909.

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