A Petty Person Always Decorates a Fault

“A petty person always decorates a fault” comes from the Zi Zhang chapter of the Analects and is attributed to Zixia. Here, wen does not mean writing; it means embellishing or concealing. An early commentary glosses it as failing to state the actual facts. The sentence stands as a brief chapter of its own: a small-minded person responds to an error by dressing it in excuses.

Explaining why a mistake occurred is not automatically evasion. The boundary is whether the facts are still acknowledged, responsibility is still accepted, and correction remains possible. Once a reason is used to cancel those three things, greater sophistication may only produce a more polished disguise.

https://ctext.org/analects/zi-zhang/zh
https://ctext.org/lunyu-zhushu/zi-zhang/zh