Wit & Attitude Quote by Mencius

Mencius isn’t offering self-help; he’s drawing a hard boundary around moral agency and then refusing to negotiate with mediocrity. The first sentence reads like an internal law: your “sense of right” isn’t a mood or a social fashion, it’s a governing faculty that should veto both action and appetite. He pairs “do” with “desire” to close the usual loophole people try to slip through: even if you behave, you can still rot privately in what you want. For Mencius, moral cultivation is upstream of conduct; the point is to discipline the heart-mind so the wrong thing doesn’t even look tempting.

“This is sufficient” is the knife twist. No baroque metaphysics, no elaborate ritualism. A minimal rule becomes maximal demand: keep your inner compass intact, and everything else follows. The subtext is a rebuke to rationalizers, the kind who ask for more complicated guidance because complexity can be used as cover.

Then he snaps to craft. “The skillful artist will not alter his measures for the sake of a stupid workman” sounds elitist, but in context it’s a defense of standards against dilution. Mencius is writing within the Confucian project of training rulers and officials, where bad governance often comes from flattering the incapable or lowering expectations to match them. The “measures” are both literal tools and moral metrics: principles don’t get resized to fit incompetence. If the worker can’t build to spec, the answer isn’t to bend the ruler; it’s to improve the worker - or replace him.