The final "e" is hardly pronounced, like the last syllable of "macabre."
“The man of honour thinks of his character, the inferior man of his position. The man of honour desires justice, the inferior man favour.” Confucius
Confucius say: Wise man never play leapfrog with unicorn.
Story of Civilization series! An excellent homeschooling resource.
Actually, all one needs to do is to read the Analects in a decent translation with some annotations. All due respect for Durant, but Confucius can speak for himself.
Confucius was never a very high level administrator, he was too honest and honorable to go very far in government; his students however did.
I read an argument that the Analects is the most influential book in history. EVERY educated person in China, for nearly 2400 years, had to memorize his writings; that is a lot of people, over a long period of time.
Interestingly, one saying is pretty much the same as the Golden Rule, albeit in negative formation (”Do not do to others what you would not want done to you”)
The fundamental point he made was this: to be a good civil servant, one must balance dutifulness and empathy. If you follow every last rule to the ridiculous extreme, always the letter of the law, you can end up wasting lives and resources, on the other hand if all you do is go by feelings you can’t run things in an effective or fair manner.