Top 15 Ihara Saikaku Quotes

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

If making money is a slow process, losing it is quickly done.

Like ice beneath the sun's rays — to such poverty did he fall...his fortune melted to water.

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

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

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.

To think twice in every matter and follow the lead of others is no way to make money.

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

There is always something to upset the most careful of human calculations.

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.

In life it is training rather than birth which counts.

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

The first consideration for all, throughout life, is the earning of a living.

Heaven says nothing, and the whole earth grows rich beneath its silent rule. Men, too, are touched by heaven's virtue; yet, in their greater part, they are creatures of deceit. They are born, it seems, with an emptiness of soul, and must take their qualities wholly from things without. To be born thus empty into this modern age, this mixture of good and ill, and yet steer through life on an honest course to the splendors of success — this is a feat reserved for paragons of our kind, a task beyond the nature of the normal man.