Mencius Quotes

How hard you work at correcting your faults reveals your character.

I challenge you to make your life a masterpiece. I challenge you to join the ranks of those people who live what they teach, who walk their talk.

You have got to clean your own house first before you tell other people that they aren't doing it right.

My power for good, whatever it may, would be gone if I didn’t try to live up to the doctrines I have tried to preach.

The weakest man is the one who is able to correct his moral defects, but doesn't take action.

Let no man give advice to others that he has not first given himself.

The safest principle through life, instead of reforming others, is to set about perfecting yourself.

Therefore the superior man is watchful over himself, when he is alone.

A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.

The leader who exercises power with honor will work from the inside out, starting with himself.

How can I govern others, who can't even govern myself?

When any of us thinks of ourselves as a role model - whether that's as a parent being observed by their kids or a leader under the microscope of their followers - it creates a natural stepping up of how we carry ourselves and what we expect from ourselves.

Character isn't something you were born with and can't change, like your fingerprints. It's something you weren't born with and must take responsibility for forming.

Respect for self is the beginning of cultivating virtue in men and women.

Some men can live up to their loftiest ideals without ever going higher than a basement.

You cannot lead others until you have first learned to lead yourself.

How well I walk my talk, and not talk my talk, determines the quality of my engagement, of all my experience with what is quite personally my God. I'm my greatest teacher, and within me, I have the power to push myself deeper and higher.

When you locate good in yourself, approve of it with determination. When you locate evil in yourself, despise it as something detestable.

Your character will be what you yourself choose to make it.

What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.

Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President.

Character is a journey, not a destination.

A man must himself be cleansed, before cleansing others

What, pray, does it profit a man to teach others, and to be prating always about virtue, in high-sounding words, if he fails to give heed to his own instructions?

One who aspires to greatness should read and study, pursuing the True Way with such a firm resolve that he is perfectly straightforward and open, rises above the superficialities of conventional behavior, and refuses to be satisfied with the petty or commonplace.