Quotes About Confucius

No doubt Confucius, as a person and as represented in the written tradition, is suffering an eclipse in Communist China because he is associated with those classes whose wealth is being proscribed as sops to bait the allegiance of the masses to the new political group. As students of history know, new political groups everywhere and throughout history have always proceeded thus.

The implications for politics were immense. If instead of ruthlessly pursuing his own self-interest to the detriment of others, a ruler would curb his ego and submit to li for a single day, Confucius believed, everyone under Heaven would respond to his goodness!

Heaven is author of the virtue that is in me

The new religion without any secrets is philosophy. The old religion, said Aristotle, is necessary only for the uneducated; Confucius, Buddha, Voltaire and Lessing were of the same opinion.

Jaspers became fascinated by the fact that figures like Pythagoras (570–495 BC), the Buddha (563–483 BC), and Confucius (551–479 BC) were all contemporaries, and that Greece, India, and China, in that period, all saw a sudden efflorescence of debate between contending intellectual schools, each group apparently unaware of the others' existence.

Our headstrong passions shut the door of our souls against God.

There are those men who say to repay evil with kindness. But I say, how then are we to repay kindness? Repay kindness with kindness, but repay evil with justice.

contemporaine. Aristote plaide déjà pour un régime républicain où l'autorité s'exerce par la loi et non par la force. Athènes, modèle premier de la démocratie, conjure le recours à la violence. Et Confucius, dans la Chine ancienne, plaide pour la loi liant harmonieusement et pacifiquement l'homme à la nature. C'est à partir de la Renaissance qu'en Occident analyses et énergies convergent pour juguler le

Confucius (as the barbarians call him) also taught that, "When the government is honest, the people will learn honesty by example; when the government is crooked, the people will learn to be thieves also.

For millions upon millions of years, feelings were the best algorithms in the world. Hence in the days of Confucius, of Muhammad or of Stalin, people should have listened to their feelings rather than to the teachings of Confucianism, Islam or communism. Yet

Confucius was not so much a philsopher as a proto-ideologist: what interested him was not metaphysical Truths but rather a harmonious social order within which individuals could lead happy and ethical lives. He was the first to outline clearly what one is tempted to call the elementary scene of ideology, its zero-level, which consists in asserting the (nameless) authority of some substantial Tradition.

When the people share everything in the state, then will we truly reach the goal of the Min Sheng Principle, which is Confucius' hope of a 'great commonwealth.'

In my fifth year in Beijing, I moved into a one-story brick house beside the Confucius Temple, a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China's most important philosopher.

For benefits return benefits; for injuries return justice without any admixture of revenge.

Confucius didn't care much for women: When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son.

Confucius say: "Baseball wrong — man with four balls cannot walk."

The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ.

Confucius say a woman is worth a thousand words. Tell your wife she's used up her total

You know, I met a wise man centuries ago in China who said to me, 'He who lets fear rule him, has fear for a master. (Acheron) Confucius? (Talon) No, Minh-Quan. He was a fisherman who used to sell what I'm told was the best zong zi ever made. (Acheron)

As Confucius says, under some circumstances murder can be forgiven; but unreasonableness never is.

Hear the wind and you will know the wind. Wind blows, and the generations are its leaves. There was no higher praise than what was said of Confucius: He knows where the wind comes from.

The Chinese government has been clear in its goal and purpose for creating and expanding Confucius Institutes throughout the country, namely to distort academic discourse on China, threaten and silence defenders of human rights, and create a climate intolerant of dissent or open discussion.

Even though it is almost impossible to attribute with certainty any specific mathematical achievements either to Pythagoras himself or to his followers, there is no question that they have been responsible for a mingling of mathematics, philosophy of life, and religion unparalleled in history. In this respect it is perhaps interesting to note the historical coincidence that Pythagoras was a contemporary of Buddha and Confucius.

If the impulse to act correctly did not come from yourself, Confucius said to a follower, what good could it do for you? In his mind, the moral was beautiful, and it should not succumb to rules. Rules diminish its beauty and subtlety, and adherence to them is an admission of one's own moral failure.