Ihara Saikaku Quotes

Take care! Kingdoms are destroyed by bandits, houses by rats, and widows by suitors.

Ancient simplicity is gone…the people of today are satisfied with nothing but finery.

Though mothers and fathers give us life, it is money alone which preserves it.

Like ice beneath the sun’s rays – to such poverty did he fall…his fortune melted to water.

For each of the four hundred and four bodily ailments celebrated physicians have produced infallible remedies, but the malady which brings the greatest distress to mankind – to even the wisest and cleverest of us – is the plague of poverty.

In life it is training rather than birth which counts.

To make a fortune some assistance from fate is essential. Ability alone is insufficient.

Harshness is for the good of a boy, soft-heartedness will ruin him.

If we live by subhuman means we might as well never have had the good fortune to be born human.

No longer can a young woman feel at ease; for she is ever concerned with the impression that she may be making on others.

When you send a clerk on business to a distant province, a man of rigid morals is not your best choice.

And why do so many people wilfully exhaust their strength in promiscuous living, when their wives are on hand from bridal night till old age – to be taken when required, like fish from a private pond.