Fake Mencius quotes divide into two groups, and the second one is harder to spot. The first group is modern lines with no Chinese behind them: BrainyQuote’s page carries “Friends are the siblings God never gave us” and two sentences about capital accumulation. The second group is real sentences said by someone else. The book quotes Confucius 22 times, the Book of Songs 26 and the Book of Documents 10, and one borrowed line became famous as Mencius’s own: 孔子曰：『天無二日，民無二王。』, “Confucius said: there are not two suns in the sky, and the people have not two kings” (Mencius 5A.4, translated from the Chinese).
Fake Mencius quotes at a glance
Eight lines that circulate under his name, what each one actually is, and the passage worth quoting in its place.
| The line as it circulates | What it really is | Quote this instead |
| “Friends are the siblings God never gave us.” | Modern. No counterpart in the text | 5B.3, on friendship with a man’s virtue |
| “Friendship is one mind in two bodies.” | Modern aphorism, widely pinned on him | 5B.3, 友也者，友其德也 |
| “People can have a long-term life plan only if their property is secure.” | Backwards reading of 1A.7 | 1A.7, 明君制民之產 |
| “Without protection of property rights, it is hard to accumulate capital.” | Modern economics; 資本 occurs 0 times | 3A.3, the well-field allotment |
| “Evil exists to glorify the good.” | Nineteenth-century theodicy | 2A.6, the four sprouts |
| “Truth uttered before its time is always dangerous.” | Untraceable; no Chinese source | 7A.14, 仁言不如仁聲 |
| “If Confucius wasn’t born, the long night would have no bright lamp.” | A later Chinese couplet about Confucius | 7B.14, 民為貴 |
| 「天無二日，民無二王」 as Mencius’s maxim | In the book, and introduced with 孔子曰 | 5A.4, read as reported speech |
What did Mencius actually say?
Ten passages that can be located by chapter, each given with its Chinese.
Why must your Majesty use that word “profit”? (1A.1)
“Why must your Majesty used that word ‘profit’? What I am likewise provided with are counsels to benevolence and righteousness; and these are my only topics.”
— Mencius 1A.1 · 王何必曰利？亦有仁義而已矣 · trans. Legge, as printed in Chinese Literature (1900)
The book opens on an argument about vocabulary. Mencius refuses the king’s framing word and substitutes two of his own, and the whole first book runs on that substitution. It’s the reason so much of what follows sounds like ethics rather than policy.
A ruler allots the means of support (1A.7)
“They are only men of education, who, without a certain livelihood, are able to maintain a fixed heart. As to the people, if they have not a certain livelihood, they will be found not to have a fixed heart.”
— Mencius 1A.7 · 無恆產而有恆心者，惟士為能。若民，則無恆產，因無恆心 · trans. Legge, as printed in Chinese Literature (1900)
恆產 héngchǎn — “constant means”; the holding a household needs in order to plan past tomorrow. Legge renders it “a certain livelihood”, which is the sense: it isn’t title to property, and the sentence that follows puts the duty on the ruler, not the subject.
The next line is the one that decides the property argument: 是故明君制民之產, “therefore an intelligent ruler regulates the livelihood of the people”, and Legge has it as “an intelligent ruler will regulate the livelihood of the people, so as to make sure that, above, they shall have sufficient wherewith to serve their parents”. The verb is 制, to set or to allot, and its subject is the ruler. The same chapter specifies the allotment: 五畝之宅，樹之以桑, homesteads of five acres with mulberry planted about them, and a hundred acres of field per household.
The four sprouts (2A.6)
“The feeling of commiseration is the beginning of humaneness; the feeling of shame and dislike is the beginning of righteousness; the feeling of deference and compliance is the beginning of propriety; and the feeling of right and wrong is the beginning of wisdom.”
— Mencius 2A.6 · 惻隱之心，仁之端也；羞惡之心，義之端也 · translated from the Chinese
四端 sìduān — the four sprouts or beginnings; the claim is that everyone starts with them, not that everyone finishes with them. He puts it in the chapter you have already read if you have read any Mencius at all: the man who sees a child about to fall into a well feels alarm before he calculates anything. The first sprout is the beginning of ren, and the whole argument is laid out at Mencius on human nature.
Choosing righteousness over life (6A.10)
“Fish is what I want; bear’s paw is also what I want. If I cannot have both, I let the fish go and take the bear’s paw. Life is what I want; righteousness is also what I want. If I cannot keep both, I let life go and choose righteousness.”
— Mencius 6A.10 · 魚，我所欲也；熊掌，亦我所欲也…舍生而取義者也 · translated from the Chinese
The people rank first (7B.14)
“The people are the most precious; the altars of land and grain come next; the ruler is the lightest.”
— Mencius 7B.14 · 民為貴，社稷次之，君為輕 · translated from the Chinese
The most quoted political line in the book is here, and unlike most of them it is genuinely his. The chapter continues in a way quote pages rarely include: a ruler who endangers the altars is replaced, and altars that fail in drought and flood are replaced too.
The great man keeps a child’s heart (4B.12)
“The great man is the one who has not lost the heart of a newborn.”
— Mencius 4B.12 · 大人者，不失其赤子之心者也 · translated from the Chinese
Friendship is friendship with a man’s virtue (5B.3)
“Friendship is friendship with a man’s virtue, and there must be nothing held over him.”
— Mencius 5B.3 · 友也者，友其德也，不可以有挾也 · translated from the Chinese
The chapter spells out what cannot be held over a friend: age, rank, and the standing of one’s brothers. This is the book’s actual sentence about friendship, and it is about power, not affection.
Heaven assigns the hard job (6B.15)
“So when Heaven is about to lay a great charge on this man, it first embitters his mind and will, exhausts his sinews and bones, starves his body and skin, and reduces him to destitution.”
— Mencius 6B.15 · 故天將降大任於是人也，必先苦其心志，勞其筋骨 · translated from the Chinese
The line that every Chinese schoolchild learns ends the chapter: 生於憂患, life grows out of trouble and death out of ease. A note on the wording, since it is the one place where editions differ visibly: this edition reads 於是人也, “this man”, where the version in circulation reads 於斯人也. Same grammar, and the popular form has displaced the other in quoting.
Three delights, and ruling is not one of them (7A.20)
“To get the most talented people in the world and teach and nurture them is the third delight.”
— Mencius 7A.20 · 得天下英才而教育之，三樂也 · translated from the Chinese
The three are that his parents are alive and his brothers give no cause for anxiety, that he has no occasion for shame before Heaven or blushing before men, and this. Being king over the world, he says, is not among them.
The path through the mountain (7B.21)
“A path opens where the mountain track is used consistently; if it goes unused for a while, grass stops it up.”
— Mencius 7B.21 · 山徑之蹊閒，介然用之而成路。為閒不用，則茅塞之矣 · translated from the Chinese
Mencius says it to a disciple named Gaozi, and the last clause is the point: 今茅塞子之心矣, your heart has been stopped up with grass.
Why does the Mencius collect other people’s words?
Because the book is built out of them. I counted the quotation markers in the 1975 Chinese Mencius edition: 孔子曰, “Confucius said”, occurs 22 times; 詩云, “the Songs say”, 26 times; 書曰, “the Documents say”, 10 times. Against those, 孟子曰, “Mencius said”, occurs 223 times, so roughly one in four of the book’s attributed speeches belongs to somebody else. The borrowed material is mostly Confucianism‘s own scripture and its founder.
The structure is the whole explanation for the second group of fake quotes. A sentence that appears inside the Mencius is not automatically a sentence by Mencius, and English quote pages copy sentences out of the book without noticing who is speaking. The clearest case has a documented paper trail.
「天無二日，民無二王」
“Confucius said: there are not two suns in the sky, and the people have not two kings.”
— Mencius 5A.4 · 孔子曰：『天無二日，民無二王。』 · translated from the Chinese
Anthony Giddens printed this in The Nation-State and Violence (1987) as “Mencius’s aphorism”, having read it in an English translation of Li Jiannong’s Political History of China where the line was introduced as Mencius quoting Confucius. The 1998 Chinese translation of Giddens rendered the name as 門修斯, which is how the error entered Chinese as a byword for bad translation. The sentence is in the book at 5A.4, and the book itself puts 孔子曰 in front of it. Confucius gets the same treatment on a larger scale, which is what Fake Confucius Quotes is for.
How to check a Mencius quote in a minute
Three steps, in the order that catches the most errors.
- Ask whether the Chinese exists. Search the line’s key noun in the Chinese text of the Mencius. 資本, capital, occurs 0 times in the book. So does the word for “rights”. A line whose central concept has no character behind it is a modern line.
- Ask who is speaking. If the sentence sits in a passage that begins 孔子曰, 詩云 or 書曰, it is reported speech. Roughly one in four of the book’s speeches is.
- Ask for the chapter. The Mencius is cited two ways: ctext counts fourteen half-books (萬章上 = 9), English scholarship counts seven books in halves (萬章上 = 5A). A page that gives no chapter at all has usually not looked.
Which Mencius quotes are fake?
“Friends are the siblings God never gave us.”
Not his. The word 上帝 does occur three times in the book, and every one of them is inside a quotation from the Book of Documents; it is never his own term for the divine, which is 天. The sentiment has no counterpart at all. The book’s line on friendship is 5B.3, and it is about not holding rank over a friend.
“Friendship is one mind in two bodies.”
Also not his, and easy to believe because it sounds like something a classical philosopher would say. I searched the Chinese for the underlying idea and found nothing like it. It circulates on BrainyQuote and wherever its lists get copied.
“People can have a long-term life plan only if they know their private property is secure.”
Here a real teaching has been turned inside out. Mencius does say that without 恆產 the people have no 恆心, a fixed heart. But the sentence that follows puts the responsibility on the ruler, who 制民之產, allots the means of support, and the policy he describes in 3A.3 is the well-field: 方里而井，井九百畝，其中為公田, a square li divided into nine hundred acres with the middle hundred worked in common by eight households. That’s land distribution with a common field, not a doctrine of holdings secure against the state. It is the state doing the securing.
“Without effective protection of the citizens’ right to property, it will be difficult to attract and accumulate valuable capital.”
Same family, one step further from the text. 資本 occurs 0 times in the Mencius, and I found no Chinese source for this sentence or for “secure property in hand leads to peace in mind”, which sits beside it on the same page. All three are modern restatements of 1A.7 by someone with a different economics.
“Evil exists to glorify the good. Evil is negative good. It is a relative term.”
Not his, and the vocabulary gives it away: a theodicy is an answer to a problem the Mencius does not have. His account of badness is that the sprouts get starved, uprooted or neglected, and 2A.6 says plainly that a man who has the four beginnings and says he cannot develop them is destroying himself.
“Truth uttered before its time is always dangerous.”
I could not trace this to any Chinese passage, and its origin is unclear to me. It is listed on BrainyQuote without a source, which is how most of these travel. If a safer line about speech is wanted, 7A.14 has 仁言不如仁聲之入人深也: kindly words do not enter men as deeply as a reputation for kindness does.
“If Confucius wasn’t born, the long night would have no bright lamp.”
A couplet about Confucius, and not from the Warring States period. No source has been found for it, so I won’t name one; what I can say is that it is not in the Mencius, and that the book’s own praise of Confucius is 7B.14’s ranking of the people above the ruler, which is a political claim rather than a tribute.
“People are naturally good; it is their education that makes them bad.”
Half of this is Mencius and half of it is not. He does argue that human nature tends to good, as water tends to flow downward. The second clause reverses him: education and nourishment are precisely what he spends the book recommending, on the grounds that the sprouts recover when they are tended. The formula that nurture is what corrupts is Rousseau’s from Émile, and Mencius is the wrong sage to hang it on.
Questions People Ask About Mencius Quotes
What is the most faked of the fake Mencius quotes?
The property lines, because a real teaching sits underneath them. “Without protection of property rights it is difficult to accumulate capital” has no counterpart in the text, while the passage it grew from, 1A.7, says the opposite: 明君制民之產, the intelligent ruler allots the people’s livelihood. 資本 occurs 0 times in the book.
Did Mencius say 「天無二日，民無二王」?
The answer is reported speech. The sentence sits at Mencius 5A.4 and the text introduces it with 孔子曰, “Confucius said”. Giddens printed it in 1987 as Mencius’s own aphorism, and the 1998 Chinese translation carried the error over under the name 門修斯.
How can you tell if a Mencius quote is real?
Look for three things: a chapter number in one of the two systems, a Chinese original, and the speaker marker. Roughly one in four attributed speeches in the book belongs to Confucius, the Book of Songs or the Book of Documents rather than to Mencius. A line whose central noun has no Chinese character behind it is modern.
Why are there so few verified English translations of Mencius?
Because most of them are under copyright. Legge’s 1861 version is public domain but I could fetch only Book I Part I, through the 1900 Wilson printing at Gutenberg #10056; the later books aren’t available to me in a pre-1930 English text. Everything on this page not labelled “trans. Legge” was translated from the Chinese by the author, and a collection of fake Mencius quotes is only as good as its willingness to say so.
