Confucius
Two and a half thousand years of Chinese ethics
Personal Growth
About
Confucius spent his life trying and failing to get a ruler to employ him, and shaped East Asian thought more thoroughly than any statesman ever did. The Analects are fragments — answers to students, remarks in passing — assembled after his death. He returns constantly to the junzi, the superior man, less a saint than someone who has decided what he is willing to be.
Read Confucius when you want a standard to hold yourself to that has nothing to do with results.
Personal Growth
When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.
The Analects of Confucius, Book I, Chapter VIII
Relationships
What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.
The Analects of Confucius, Book XV, Chapter XXIII
Personal Growth
The superior man wishes to be slow in his speech and earnest in his conduct.
The Analects of Confucius, Book IV, Chapter XXIV
Personal Growth
If a man take no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.
The Analects of Confucius, Book XV, Chapter XI
Resilience
To be poor without murmuring is difficult. To be rich without being proud is easy.
The Analects of Confucius, Book XIV, Chapter XI
Personal Growth
What the superior man seeks, is in himself. What the mean man seeks, is in others.
The Analects of Confucius, Book XV, Chapter XX
Personal Growth
To tell, as we go along, what we have heard on the way, is to cast away our virtue.
The Analects of Confucius, Book XVII, Chapter XIV
Psychology
The superior man is satisfied and composed; the mean man is always full of distress.
The Analects of Confucius, Book VII, Chapter XXXVI
Philosophy
If a man in the morning hear the right way, he may die in the evening without regret.
The Analects of Confucius, Book IV, Chapter VIII
Personal Growth
At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.
The Analects of Confucius, Book II, Chapter IV
Resilience
The wise are free from perplexities; the virtuous from anxiety; and the bold from fear.
The Analects of Confucius, Book IX, Chapter XXVIII
Personal Growth
The progress of the superior man is upwards; the progress of the mean man is downwards.
The Analects of Confucius, Book XIV, Chapter XXIV
Leadership
The superior man is catholic and no partisan. The mean man is partisan and not catholic.
The Analects of Confucius, Book II, Chapter XIV
Personal Growth
A man can enlarge the principles which he follows; those principles do not enlarge the man.
The Analects of Confucius, Book XV, Chapter XXVIII
Resilience
When the year becomes cold, then we know how the pine and the cypress are the last to lose their leaves.
The Analects of Confucius, Book IX, Chapter XXVII
