"Ch'iu! Get rid of your dogmatism and your specious knowledge, and you will be really a superior man."
Confucius bowed and was about to retire, when suddenly his countenance changed and he enquired, "Shall I then be able to enter upon Tao?"
"The wounds of one generation being too much," answered Lao Lai Tzŭ, "you would take to yourself the sorrows of all time. Are you not weary? Is your strength equal to the task?
"To employ goodness as a passport to influence through the gratification of others, is an everlasting shame. Yet this is the common way of all, to lure people by fame, to bind them by ties of gratification.
"Better than extolling Yao and cursing Chieh is oblivion of both, keeping one's praises to oneself. These things react injuriously on self; the agitation of movement results in deflection.
"The true Sage is a passive agent. If he succeeds, he simply feels that he was provided by no effort of his own with the energy necessary to success."
Prince Yüan of Sung dreamed one night that a man with dishevelled hair peeped through a side door and said, "I have come from the waters of Tsai-lu. I am a marine messenger attached to the staff of the River God. A fisherman, named Yü Ch'ieh, has caught me."
When the prince awaked, he referred his dream to the soothsayers, who said, "This is a divine tortoise."