Confucius › Confucius did not say
Confucius did not say
The lines most often quoted as his are mostly not his. Here is where five of them actually come from, and when his name got attached.
Choose a job you love
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
An American journalist, writing a column about computers in June 1985, put Confucius's name on it. Three years before, a philosophy professor in a Princeton alumni magazine gave it to an old-timer. Before that, nothing.
An anonymous American saying from the 1980s. No Chinese behind it. The nearest thing in the Analects is about learning, and drier: He that knows is below him that loves, and he that loves below him that delights therein.
A journey of a thousand miles
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
The Daodejing, a different book from a different tradition. The Chinese says a journey of a thousand li begins beneath your feet. A li is roughly a quarter of a mile.
Ancient and Chinese, but somebody else's. The step is an English addition.
I hear and I forget
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
Xunzi, a follower of his school about two centuries later, set out four steps: hearing of a thing is better than not hearing, seeing better than hearing, knowing better than seeing, doing better than knowing. Xunzi reached English in 1928. A Pennsylvania newspaper hedged the credit in 1962, Says Confucious?, and by 1989 it was his outright.
A sentence by a man who never met him, cut down by people who had read neither of them. For a while it also belonged to Benjamin Franklin.
Our greatest glory
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Oliver Goldsmith, in 1760, in the seventh of his letters from Lien Chi Altangi, a Chinese philosopher he had invented, living in London. Goldsmith had never been to China. By 1831 a London magazine was printing the line as Confucius.
An Englishman, in a made-up Chinese voice. Later it was handed to Emerson, to a football coach, and to Nelson Mandela.
‘Confucius say …’
The pidgin one-liner: Confucius say …, followed by a joke in broken English.
American, and younger than the talkies. Guy Lombardo recorded ‘Confucius Say’ in New York on 22 November 1939 (Decca 2917). Walter Winchell was credited at the time with popularising it. On 19 February 1940 Life reported it as a national craze, and in March the Associated Press ran a strip called ‘Confucius Really Said’ for six days.
Nothing in the genre has any relation to anything he said. The broken English was the joke.
What he did say
The book sets two scenes from the early record against the fakes. In one, he asks four students what they would do if anyone gave them the chance. Three describe governments. The fourth, who has been playing a lute through all of it, says that in the last days of spring he would bathe in the river Yi with a few young men and boys, and go home singing. And the teacher, who wanted a government more than any of them, sighs and says: I side with Dian.
In the other, a gatekeeper who is not recorded as ever meeting him sums him up for one of his students in a single question: The man that knows it is no good and yet must still be doing?
More about Confucius
- Did Confucius write the Analects?
- Was Confucius really called Confucius?
- What does junzi, ‘gentleman’, actually mean?
- Did Confucius open education to everyone?
- Was Confucius a government minister?
- Did Confucius invent the golden rule?
- What did Confucius say about women?
- Is Confucianism a religion?
- The timeline
- The reading room: original sources online
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