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The Master said, "I once spent all day thinking without taking food and all night thinking without going to bed, but I found that I gained nothing from it. It would have been better for me to have spent the time in learning."

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Mind

More quotes by Confucius

Being in humaneness is good. If we select other goodness and thus are far apart from humaneness, how can we be the wise?

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

There is the love of knowing without the love of learning; the beclouding here leads to dissipation of mind.

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.

The superior man loves his soul; the inferior man loves his property.

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

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Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

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The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

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The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Confucius (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.