The Exemplary Person Seeks It in Themselves

“The exemplary person seeks it in themselves; the petty person seeks it in others.” The sentence appears in the Wei Ling Gong chapter of the Analects. The chapter records it without a more specific immediate dialogue. Zhu means “it in”; to seek it in oneself is to examine one's own demands, causes or responsibilities first, while seeking it in others habitually turns the demand outwards.

The line does not say that every failure is self-caused, nor does it excuse institutional faults or another person's wrongdoing. A restrained reading is to inspect what one can change before identifying external problems accurately. Self-examination changes the order of judgement; it does not make the individual absorb every responsibility.

https://ctext.org/analects/wei-ling-gong/zh