"When you transgress, do not fear to return."

"Learn the past and you will know the future."

The great principles which he taught were chiefly based on family
affection and duty. He taught kings that they were to treat their
subjects as children, subjects to respect the kings as parents; and these
ideas so penetrated the national mind, that emperors are obliged to seem
to govern thus, even if they do not desire it. Confucius was a teacher of
reverence,--reverence for God, respect for parents, respect and reverence
for the past and its legacies, for the great men and great ideas of former
times. He taught men also to regard each other as brethren, and even the
golden rule, in its negative if not its positive form, is to be found in
his writings.

Curiously enough, this teacher of reverence was distinguished by a
remarkable lump on the top of his head, where the phrenologists have
placed the organ of veneration.[13] Rooted in his organization, and
strengthened by all his convictions, this element of adoration seemed to
him the crown of the whole moral nature of man. But, while full of
veneration, he seems to have been deficient in the sense of spiritual
things. A personal God was unknown to him; so that his worship was
directed, not to God, but to antiquity, to ancestors, to propriety and
usage, to the state as father and mother of its subjects, to the ruler as
in the place of authority. Perfectly sincere, deeply and absolutely
assured of all that he knew, he said nothing he did not believe. His power
came not only from the depth and clearness of his convictions, but from
the absolute honesty of his soul.