Quotation
Last reviewed:
“The gentleman says: Learning must never stop.”
Xunzi · Confucianism · Ancient · 3rd century BCE
What does it mean?
The usual reading is that study is not a phase you complete. The gentleman's saying opens a chapter about accumulation: dye darker than the plant, ice colder than water, wood bent and held in the new shape. A competing reading hears a scolding of the lazy, without his further claim that nature is not enough and that deliberate effort reshapes it. The line is the first sentence of chapter 1, and the indigo sentence, already here, is the first comparison. Learning, for Xunzi, includes the rites and the teachers, not only information. It stops at death, he says later, and giving it up is how a person becomes a beast. The opening is the rule the comparisons explain.
Did Xunzi really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Hutton's English of the first sentence of chapter 1. The next sentence, that blue dye comes from indigo and is bluer than the plant, is already in this library. Stopping is the thing the chapter refuses.
Where it comes from
Xunzi, chapter 1, 'An Exhortation to Learning', in Eric L. Hutton's translation
Approximate date: 3rd century BCE.
How to use it
A nurse in Sheffield who treats the last mandatory module as the end of learning, and then meets a drug she was never taught, is the case the sentence is about. It does not say every course is good. It says the work of being shaped does not have a graduation after which nature will do the rest. He thinks nature will not. The bent wood stays bent because the process went on long enough.
A mindset reading
Do not file education under a decade you have finished. The habit is to ask what you are still being steamed into, and by whom. Xunzi is harsher than the slogan 'keep learning' suggests. He thinks untaught impulse runs crooked. The sentence is an exhortation with a theory of human nature behind it, the theory he states outright in the chapter on nature being bad.
Understand the philosophy
Chapter 1 is Quan xue, an exhortation to learning, and it is the book's front door. The key contrast, developed later, is between raw nature and deliberate effort, wei. Xunzi disagrees with Mencius, who thinks the sprouts are already good. Here the gentleman speaks first, and the craft analogies follow: dye, ice, wood, metal on the stone. Learning is how a person is made, not how a good nature is polished.
- knowledge
- virtue
- change
FAQ
What does it mean?
The usual reading is that study is not a phase you complete. The gentleman's saying opens a chapter about accumulation: dye darker than the plant, ice colder than water, wood bent and held in the new shape. A competing reading hears a scolding of the lazy, without his further claim that nature is not enough and that deliberate effort reshapes it. The line is the first sentence of chapter 1, and the indigo sentence, already here, is the first comparison. Learning, for Xunzi, includes the rites and the teachers, not only information. It stops at death, he says later, and giving it up is how a person becomes a beast. The opening is the rule the comparisons explain.
Did Xunzi really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Hutton's English of the first sentence of chapter 1. The next sentence, that blue dye comes from indigo and is bluer than the plant, is already in this library. Stopping is the thing the chapter refuses.
Which work is it in?
Xunzi, chapter 1, 'An Exhortation to Learning', in Eric L. Hutton's translation Approximate date: 3rd century BCE.