Abandon sageliness and discard wisdom, and the people will benefit a hundredfold. Abandon benevolence and discard righteousness, and the people will return to filial piety and paternal love. Abandon skill and discard profit, and there will be no thieves or robbers.
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"The Sage manages affairs without doing anything, and spreads doctrines without speaking."
"The more you know, the less you understand."
"The more taboos and prohibitions there are in the world, the poorer the people will be."
"One who makes promises rashly rarely keeps good faith; One who is in the habit of considering things easy meets with frequent difficulties."
"The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people will be. The more sharp weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be. The more cunning and skill man possesses, the more peculiar…"
Reputed founder of Taoism and author of the Tao Te Ching, whose wu wei (effortless action) shaped East Asian philosophy. Closely associated with Zhuangzi (later Taoist who extended Laozi's framework). For an intellectual contrast, see Confucius, near-contemporary Chinese sage of social ritual and duty — Confucius systematized social order through ritual and hierarchy; Laozi argued that all such systems were the disease, not the cure — the two founding poles of Chinese moral philosophy.
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Drop the lofty labels society celebrates—clever wisdom, moral righteousness, and profitable skills—and ordinary people will thrive. When authorities stop performing virtue and scheming for gain, families naturally care for each other and theft disappears. The argument is that imposed ideals and ambition create the very problems they claim to solve; stripping them away lets genuine goodness emerge on its own.
Laozi, the semi-legendary founder of Taoism, reportedly served as an archivist in the Zhou court before withdrawing from public life, disillusioned by its decay. His teaching here mirrors that exit: rejecting Confucian prescriptions of sageliness, benevolence, and righteousness in favor of wu wei, effortless naturalness. The Tao Te Ching he left behind consistently favors simplicity, humility, and returning to an uncarved, unforced state over cultivated virtue.
Laozi lived during the late Zhou dynasty (6th–4th century BCE), a period of collapsing feudal order sliding toward the Warring States era. Rival thinkers—especially Confucians—proposed elaborate moral codes, ritual, and scholar-officials to restore stability. Laozi pushed back: the more rulers legislated virtue and prized cleverness, the more corruption, ambition, and banditry followed. His saying is a direct response to that intellectual arms race over how to save a fracturing society.
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