Ihara Saikaku quotes:
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Take care! Kingdoms are destroyed by bandits, houses by rats, and widows by suitors.
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If making money is a slow process, losing it is quickly done.
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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.
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In life it is training rather than birth which counts.
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Ancient simplicity is gone...the people of today are satisfied with nothing but finery.
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Harshness is for the good of a boy, soft-heartedness will ruin him.
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When you send a clerk on business to a distant province, a man of rigid morals is not your best choice.
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To make a fortune some assistance from fate is essential. Ability alone is insufficient.
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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.
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Men take their misfortunes to heart and keep them there.
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No longer can a young woman feel at ease; for she is ever concerned with the impression that she may be making on others.
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Like ice beneath the sun's rays - to such poverty did he fall...his fortune melted to water.
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If we live by subhuman means we might as well never have had the good fortune to be born human.
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To think twice in every matter and follow the lead of others is no way to make money.
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The first consideration for all, throughout life, is the earning of a living.
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There is always something to upset the most careful of human calculations.
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Though mothers and fathers give us life, it is money alone which preserves it.