Hold on to your life and make it honest and brave.

People tend to be put off by the idea of selling sex, but if you spend a winter's night with one of them and talk with her about her family and so on, you're likely to find she's just like any other woman.

The line between life and death is not thicker than an eyelid.

It does happen, of course, that the priesthood has been on bad terms with womankind for some three thousand years. You see, Buddhism teaches that women are evil. Fiends. Messengers of hell. I've spent years immersed in the scriptures, so it's no accident that you and I fight all the time.

The truth of the scholar, alone in his study, does not always accord with what the world at large considers to be true.

To Kiyomori each stall, each soul here seemed borne under by the crushing weight of the world; everyone here was a pitiful weed, trodden underfoot -- a conglomeration of human lives putting down roots in this slime, living and letting live in the struggle to survive; and he was stirred by the fearful and magnificent courage communicated by the scene.

The summit is believed to be the object of the climb. But its true object--the joy of living--is not in the peak itself, but in the adversities encountered on the way up.