Confucius Quotes

“Moreover, the new wealth the region now enjoys is convincing East Asians to revisit their ancient culture with fresh, more confident eyes. No longer does success automatically equate with westernization; East Asians are finding new value in their old practices, teachings, and traditions. “The 200 years of Western colonization and domination of Asia was like pouring concrete slabs over Asia’s history,” Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, and one of Asia’s most influential academics, told me over lunch in Beijing. “For Asia to modernize, Asia had to reject its past. Asia’s past was a burden so they focused on learning the best of the West. But now that they have succeeded, they are in a position to reengage with their past in a different way. You have to develop what I call ‘cultural confidence.’ What Asia is doing is finally drilling through those slabs and reconnecting back with its past. There will be a kind of cultural renaissance taking place in Asia.” He calls this trend “the most significant thing happening in Asia today.”
― Michael Schuman, Confucius: And the World He Created

“Fair or unfair, however, globalization has not been kind to Confucius. The Western ideas that have seeped into East Asian society over the past two hundred years have caused many in the region to rethink the value of their Confucian heritage. Western political and social philosophies brought in very different concepts of family and gender relationships, systems of government and education, and methods of corporate governance. Democracy has taken hold, as have American notions of gender equality, personal freedoms, and the rule of law. East Asian nations are being profoundly altered by these new ideas. Democracy movements have toppled authoritarian regimes across East Asia. Women are increasingly fighting for their proper place in politics and the corporate world. For much of the past two centuries, East Asians have equated progress with westernization, striving to copy its economic, political, and social systems. Capitalism and industrialization became the tools to end poverty and gain clout on the world stage, electoral politics the ideal for choosing leaders and navigating divisions in society. The route to success no longer passed through Confucian academies, but through Harvard and Yale. Being westernized, in language, dress, and social life, has been the mark of being modern and competitive. Politicians and reformers across East Asia have sought to uproot Confucian influence, at times violently, in their quest for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Many East Asians no longer wished to be Confucius, as they had for centuries on end. They wished to forget him.”
― Michael Schuman, Confucius: And the World He Created

“The Confucius we know today is not the creation of the Chinese alone. The modern Confucius is “a product fashioned over several centuries by many hands, ecclesiastical and lay, Western and Chinese,” said historian Lionel Jensen. By Jensen’s reckoning, Confucius is in part the creation of Jesuit missionaries who arrived in China in the sixteenth century. As they tried to make sense of this new and foreign civilization in a way they could understand, they manufactured a coherent “-ism,” with a great saint as its founder, in a form that the Chinese themselves had never envisioned. The name “Confucius” itself is a Jesuit invention, a strange transliteration of the Chinese Kong fuzi, a (rarely used) form of “Master Kong,” the “Kong” being his family name. The Confucius we know, Jensen asserted, is a “figment of the Western imagination.”4”
― Michael Schuman, Confucius: And the World He Created

“Every age has its own Confucius, and in each age there are several different kinds of Confuciuses,” wrote twentieth-century historian Gu Jiegang. “The figure of Confucius continually changes according to whatever the people of each age think or say about him. But most people are not at all aware of this, and they ultimately don’t understand what the real face of Confucius is.”
― Michael Schuman, Confucius: And the World He Created

“The Confucian experience was very much a quest for moral self-perfection. “The superior man examines his heart, that there may be nothing wrong there, and that he may have no cause for dissatisfaction with himself,” explained one classic Confucian text. “That wherein the superior man cannot be equaled is simply this—his work which other men cannot see.”7 The sometimes clinical practicality of Confucius”
― Michael Schuman, Confucius: And the World He Created

“At the very heart of Confucius’s philosophy is a belief in the power of the individual. If people act with virtue, the entire world will be at peace. Conversely, a chaotic society plagued by destitution and war is the result of selfishness and immorality. In Confucius’s eyes, man does have a role to play in the cosmos—what we do every day has an impact on everything around us. We don’t just wander about aimlessly bumping into each other, with no purpose or meaning. What we do determines the difference between wealth and poverty, war and peace, order and disorder, justice and injustice. The virtuous acts of one person can have an almost magical quality to change the world. Looking over all is something Confucius”
― Michael Schuman, Confucius: And the World He Created

“In fact, he studiously evaded talking about death at all. When one disciple queried him on the topic, Confucius answered: “You do not understand even life. How can you understand death?”6 For Confucius, exerting energy on such matters was a waste of time. He was very much a man of the here and now, focused primarily on solving real issues people faced in the real world. He sought to instill morality in man, ensure good government, strengthen the family, and bring prosperity to society. His goal was to teach people to be virtuous and put that virtue to use by building a better society. Wild speculation about the unknowable was a distraction, in his opinion, from the more important (and more practical) task of making the world a more harmonious place.”
― Michael Schuman, Confucius: And the World He Created

“Good teachers can do more than just get their students to balance an equation or recall the names of presidents. They can shape what people believe and how they conduct their lives; they can encourage a passion to learn and excel.”
― Michael Schuman, Confucius: And the World He Created

“Confucius has been more a symbol than an actual man, for both his supporters and his enemies. He has been an icon of China’s cultural heritage, a totem of imperial government, the archetypal human being, the face of oppression, the voice of transformation, the patron of learning, a tool for public relations, a spiritual guide, and the emblem of everything grand and everything bad about China. He has been both a reactionary and a revolutionary, a dictator and a democrat, a feudal lord and a capitalist, a brilliant scholar and a simple fraud, a xenophobe and a globalist, a pillar of authority and a dangerous dissident,”
― Michael Schuman, Confucius: And the World He Created

“about Confucius. That lack of knowledge is actually quite dangerous. As Asia rises in global importance, with greater clout in the global economy and international geopolitics than the region has enjoyed in centuries, Confucius and the culture he created are rising with it. To contend with the newly empowered nations of East Asia, to understand what makes the region’s businessmen, politicians,”
― Michael Schuman, Confucius: And the World He Created

“CONFUCIUS’S ATTENDANCE AT my wedding ceremony is just one very minor example of the influence the great sage still wields today. Twenty-five hundred years after Confucius first expounded his ideas, they remain ensconced within the societies of East Asia, having survived endless political upheavals, economic metamorphoses, and a torrent of foreign doctrines, religions, and cultural”
― Michael Schuman, Confucius: And the World He Created