Quotes by Mencius

“Great is the man who has not lost his childlike heart.”

“Evil exists to glorify the good. Evil is negative good. It is a relative term. Evil can be transmuted into good. What is evil to one at one time, becomes good at another time to somebody else.”

“Kindly words do not enter so deeply into men as a reputation for kindness.”

“If the king loves music, there is little wrong in the land”

“Truth uttered before its time is always dangerous”

“We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.”

“It is not difficult to govern. All one has to do is not to offend the noble families.”

“He who attends to his greater self becomes a great man, and he who attends to his smaller self becomes a small man”

“Let men decide firmly what they will not do, and they will be free to do vigorously what they ought to do”

A man must not be without shame, for the shame of being without shame is shamelessness indeed.

The way of truth is like a great road. It is not difficult to know it. The evil is only that men will not seek it.

Words that speak of things close at hand and carry far-reaching implications – those are the good words.

Words that defy reality are ominous. And it’s ominous reality that confronts those who would obscure the wise and worthy.

Only when there are things a man will not do is he capable of doing great things.

There’s only one way to know if people are good or evil: look at the choices they make. We each contain precious and worthless, great and small. Never injure the great for the sake of the small, or the precious for the sake of the worthless. Small people nurture what is small in them; great people nurture what is great in them.

Integrity, wisdom, skill, intelligence – such things are forged in adversity.

There are people dying from famine on the roads, and you do not issue the stores of your granaries for them. When people die, you say, it is not owing to me, it is owing to the year. In what does this differ from stabbing a man and killing him, and then saying, it was not I, it was the weapon?

For nurturing the mind, there’s nothing like paring your desires away to a very few. If you have few desires, there may still be some capricious whims in your mind, but they’ll be few. If you have many desires, there may be some enduring principles in your mind, but they’ll be few indeed.

The great man is he who does not lose his childs-heart.

If someone stops where they should not, they’ll stop anywhere. If someone slights a person they should treat generously, they’ll slight anyone. And if someone races ahead, they retreat in a hurry.