Daily Inspiration Quote by Xun Kuang

Sacrifice, for Xun Kuang (Xunzi), isn’t a supernatural transaction; it’s emotional discipline with a public script. By tying sacrifices to “devotion and longing,” he strips ritual of mystical leverage and re-roots it in human psychology: we perform rites not to feed gods, but to train ourselves into reverence, gratitude, and restraint. The line’s quiet audacity is that it reframes one of ancient society’s most politically useful technologies - ceremony - as an art of managing desire.

The key pairing matters. “Devotion” suggests cultivated attachment to something larger than the self: ancestors, community, the moral order. “Longing” admits what Confucian propriety often tries to domesticate: grief, yearning, the ache of absence. Xunzi’s subtext is that ritual works because it gives longing a form. Without form, yearning metastasizes into chaos, superstition, or selfish appetite; with form, it becomes socially legible and ethically productive.

Context sharpens the intent. Xunzi wrote in the Warring States period, when old rites were fraying under war, bureaucratic centralization, and philosophical competition. He was famously skeptical about human nature, arguing that goodness is engineered, not innate. Sacrifice, then, becomes a tool of governance as much as piety: a way to align private emotion with public order. The quote defends ritual against both cynical realists (who see ceremonies as empty) and credulous believers (who treat them as magic). It’s neither empty nor magical. It’s a technology of longing, turned into a civic virtue.