Q0291

The Great Learning

A verified English rendering from the curated archive.

English

Things have roots and branches; affairs have ends and beginnings. To know what comes first and what follows is to be near the Way.
Thinker The Great Learning
School Confucian Classics
Source The Great Learning
Theme Philosophy
Another quotation More from this thinker

Source context

This English passage is associated with The Great Learning, within the tradition of Confucian Classics. The wording below is a verified rendering prepared for careful reading rather than a claim of unique translation authority.

A short reading

Read in the register of philosophy, the sentence asks the reader to test an assumption rather than to collect a slogan. In The Great Learning's wider work, similar claims are usually offered as prompts for judgment: what would have to be true for the sentence to hold, and what would follow if it did?

How to cite this quotation

APA: The Great Learning. (n.d.). Things have roots and branches; affairs have ends and beginnings. To know what comes first and what follows is to be near the Way. In Philosophy Blind Box. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0291

MLA: The Great Learning. “Things have roots and branches; affairs have ends….” Philosophy Blind Box, https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0291.

Chicago: The Great Learning. “Things have roots and branches; affairs have ends….” Philosophy Blind Box. Accessed 2026. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0291.

Same thinker

More from The Great Learning

  1. The way of great learning lies in illuminating luminous virtue, in renewing the people, and in resting in the highest good.
  2. From the Son of Heaven down to the common people, all alike take the cultivation of the person as the root.
  3. Those who wish to cultivate themselves first rectify the mind; those who wish to rectify the mind first make the intention sincere.

All quotations by The Great Learning

Same theme

More on philosophy

  1. It is through wonder that people both now begin and first began to philosophize.
  2. A person's character is their destiny.
  3. What is opposed brings together; from what differs comes the finest harmony.
  4. Death is nothing to us: for what has been dissolved has no sensation, and what has no sensation is nothing to us.
  5. Pleasure is the beginning and end of the happy life — not the pleasures of profligates, but freedom from pain in the body and from disturbance in the soul.

Browse the philosophy theme