148 Quotes by Mencius

If you know that a thing is unrighteous, then use all dispatch in putting an end to it – why wait till next year?

To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one’s life without knowing where it really leads; such is the behavior of the multitude.

It’s simple: To say anything about the nature of things, you must attend to the facts, facts in their original form. The trouble with knowledge is that it keeps chiseling things away.

When someone dies, You say, ‘It wasn’t me. It was due to the harvest.’ How is this different from killing someone by stabbing him and saying, ‘It wasn’t me. It was due to the weapon’? If Your Majesty does not blame the harvest, then the people of the world will come to You.

One who believes all of a book would be better off without books.

They agree with the current customs. They consent with an impure age. Their principles have a semblance of right-heartedness and truth. Their conduct has a semblance of disinterestedness and purity. All men are pleased with them, and they think themselves right, but you cannot enter into the Way of Yao and Shun with them. For this reason they are called “The thieves of virtue.

Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence.

A small country cannot contend with a great; the few cannot contend with the many; the weak cannot contend with the strong.

The great man is he who does not lose his child’s heart.