148 Quotes by Mencius

Make your learning abundant and speak of it with precision, then you will speak of essentials.

When men are subdued by force, they do not submit in their minds, but only because their strength is inadequate. When men are subdued by power in personality they are pleased to their very heart’s core and do really submit.

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?

There are things a person wants more than life and there are also things he or she loathes more than death.