Settle one difficulty, and you keep a hundred away.

On matters beyond his ken a gentleman speaks with caution. If names are not right, words are misused. When words are misused, affairs go wrong. When affairs go wrong, courtesy and music droop, law and justice fail. And when law and justice fail them, a people can move neither hand nor foot. So a gentleman must be ready to put names in speech, to put words into deeds. A gentleman is nowise careless of words.

The failure to cultivate virtue, the failure to examine and analyze what I have learned, the inability to move toward righteousness after being shown the way, the inability to correct my faults-these are the causes of my grief.

A man without a mustache is a man without a soul.

To know is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

Not to mend one's ways when one has erred is to err indeed.

Among the appliances to transform the people, sound and appearances are but trivial influences.