“Those who love others are constantly loved by them; those who respect others are constantly respected by them.” The sentence appears in Mencius, Li Lou II. The preceding lines say that the exemplary person keeps humanity and ritual propriety in mind, so this is not a mechanical promise that every act of respect will be repaid. The passage continues by describing self-examination when one meets hostility. Its useful emphasis today is modest: begin by asking how you are entering a relationship, rather than first calculating whether others have returned exactly what you gave.
https://ctext.org/mengzi/li-lou-ii/zhs
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