“Do not transfer anger; do not repeat a mistake.” The sentence appears in the Yong Ye chapter of the Analects. When Duke Ai asked which disciple loved learning, Confucius named Yan Hui and gave these two qualities as the reason. He then lamented Yan Hui’s early death and said he had heard of no one else who loved learning in the same way.
To “transfer anger” is to redirect anger from its proper object onto someone or something else. To “repeat a mistake” is to commit again a fault one has already recognised. The passage locates a love of learning not in the quantity of knowledge but in emotional responsibility and genuine correction. Read today, it need not demand a life without error. A more practical measure is whether we can identify what our anger is actually about, and whether one mistake changes the next action.
https://ctext.org/analects/yong-ye/zh
Discover more from Geoffrey Chen
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.