Women and people of low birth are very hard to deal with. If you are friendly with them, they get out of hand, and if you keep your distance, they resent it.
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"Study the past if you would define the future."
"The Master said, 'If a man is able to govern his country with the rules of propriety, what difficulty will he have? If he cannot govern his country with the rules of propriety, what has he to do with …"
"The Master said, 'A man can enlarge the Way, but the Way cannot enlarge a man.'"
"If a man in the morning hear the right way, he may die in the evening hear regret."
"The superior man is distressed by his lack of ability, not by the failure of others to recognize him."
Chinese philosopher and teacher whose teachings (compiled by his students in the Analects) became the foundational ethical framework of East Asian civilization for 2,500 years. Closely associated with Mencius (his most-influential follower a century later). For an intellectual contrast, see Laozi, near-contemporary Chinese sage and Tao Te Ching author — Confucius systematized social order through ritual and family hierarchy; Laozi's Taoist effortless-action philosophy argued such systems were the disease, not the cure. The two founding poles of Chinese moral philosophy — every East Asian moral tradition since has positioned itself between them.
The standard scholarly entry points to Confucius's work: Philip J. Ivanhoe (Georgetown, Chinese philosophy) — Confucian Moral Self Cultivation (2000); Edward Slingerland (UBC, Asian Studies) — Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor (2003); Tu Weiming (Harvard, Confucian scholar) — Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (1985). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Confucius.
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This saying claims that women and socially inferior people are difficult to manage in relationships. Get too close and they become presumptuous or overstep boundaries; stay too distant and they hold grudges. The speaker frames both groups as requiring careful calibration of social distance, portraying them as emotionally reactive and unable to maintain stable, respectful conduct regardless of how they are treated by their superiors.
Confucius built his ethical system around hierarchical relationships, ritual propriety, and the cultivated gentleman (junzi) contrasted with the petty person (xiaoren). Having served briefly as a minister in Lu and spent years advising rulers, he obsessed over proper conduct between superiors and subordinates. This remark reflects his rigid patriarchal worldview and his belief that moral cultivation was primarily accessible to educated men of standing, not women or commoners.
During the Spring and Autumn period (roughly 551-479 BCE), Zhou dynasty authority was collapsing and feudal states warred constantly. Chinese society was strictly patriarchal and stratified, with women confined to domestic roles and commoners excluded from education and governance. Confucius lived amid this disorder, seeking to restore social harmony through revived rituals and clear hierarchies. His views on women and low-status people reflected universal assumptions of aristocratic Zhou culture, not personal cruelty.
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