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

Ihara Saikaku Literature See all quotes by Ihara Saikaku →

React to this quote

More by Ihara Saikaku

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

Resonant Thoughts

"The world now is in a state of turmoil. It is suffering from three kinds of pain – physical, mental, spiritual – and there is only one way of being cured from these. We have to root out inhumanity and…"

— Haidakhan Babaji

Religion

#Human Nature

"The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the n…"

— Roger Ebert

Literature1942–2013

#Human Nature

"I have always been made out as a racist, someone who hates black people. I don't hate them. I grew up with them. I just know there are many differences between whites and the blacks and I will always …"

— Eugène Terre'Blanche

Literature1941–2010

#knowledge

"A living system, due to its circular organization, is an inductive system and functions always in a predictive manner: what happened once will occur again. Its organization, is conservative and repeat…"

— Humberto Maturana

Philosophy1928–2021

#history