Q0296

Zhu Xi

A verified English rendering from the curated archive.

English

To extend knowledge lies in investigating things: if one wishes to extend one's knowledge, one must approach things and exhaust their principle.
Thinker Zhu Xi
School Neo-Confucianism
Source Commentary on the Great Learning
Theme Philosophy
Another quotation More from this thinker

Source context

This English passage is associated with Commentary on the Great Learning, within the tradition of Neo-Confucianism. 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 Zhu Xi'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: Zhu Xi. (n.d.). To extend knowledge lies in investigating things: if one wishes to extend one's knowledge, one must approach things and exhaust their principle. In Philosophy Blind Box. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0296

MLA: Zhu Xi. “To extend knowledge lies in investigating things: if….” Philosophy Blind Box, https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0296.

Chicago: Zhu Xi. “To extend knowledge lies in investigating things: if….” Philosophy Blind Box. Accessed 2026. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0296.

Same thinker

More from Zhu Xi

  1. I ask the channel how it can be so clear — because fresh water keeps flowing from its source.
  2. The clearer the knowing, the more earnest the practice; the more earnest the practice, the clearer the knowing.
  3. Not leaning is called the Mean; not changing is called Constancy. The Mean is the right Way of the world; Constancy is its settled principle.

All quotations by Zhu Xi

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