1. The Master said, "A transmitter and not a maker, believing in and loving the ancients, I venture to compare myself with our old P'ang."

2. The Master said, "The silent treasuring up of knowledge; learning without satiety; and instructing others without being wearied:-which one of these things belongs to me?"

3. The Master said, "The leaving virtue without proper cultivation; the not thoroughly discussing what is learned; not being able to move towards righteousness of which a knowledge is gained; and not being able to change what is not good:-these are the things which occasion me solicitude."

4. When the Master was unoccupied with business, his manner was easy, and he looked pleased.

5. The Master said, "Extreme is my decay. For a long time, I have not dreamed, as I was wont to do, that I saw the duke of Chau."

6. The Master said, "Let the will be set on the path of duty.

7. "Let every attainment in what is good be firmly grasped.

8. "Let perfect virtue be accorded with.

9. "Let relaxation and enjoyment be found in the polite arts."

10. The Master said, "From the man bringing his bundle of dried flesh for my teaching upwards, I have never refused instruction to any one."

11. The Master said, "I do not open up the truth to one who is not eager to get knowledge, nor help out any one who is not anxious to explain himself. When I have presented one corner of a subject to any one, and he cannot from it learn the other three, I do not repeat my lesson."

12. When the Master was eating by the side of a mourner, he never ate to the full.

13. He did not sing on the same day in which he had been weeping.

14. The Master said to Yen Yuan, "When called to office, to undertake its duties; when not so called, to he retired;-it is only I and you who have attained to this."

15. Tsze-lu said, "If you had the conduct of the armies of a great state, whom would you have to act with you?"

16. The Master said, "I would not have him to act with me, who will unarmed attack a tiger, or cross a river without a boat, dying without any regret. My associate must be the man who proceeds to action full of solicitude, who is fond of adjusting his plans, and then carries them into execution."

17. The Master said, "If the search for riches is sure to be successful, though I should become a groom with whip in hand to get them, I will do so. As the search may not be successful, I will follow after that which I love."

18. The things in reference to which the Master exercised the greatest caution were-fasting, war, and sickness.

19. When the Master was in Ch'i, he heard the Shao, and for three months did not know the taste of flesh. "I did not think'" he said, "that music could have been made so excellent as this."

20. Yen Yu said, "Is our Master for the ruler of Wei?" Tsze-kung said, "Oh! I will ask him."

21. He went in accordingly, and said, "What sort of men were Po-i and Shu-ch'i?" "They were ancient worthies," said the Master. "Did they have any repinings because of their course?" The Master again replied, "They sought to act virtuously, and they did so; what was there for them to repine about?" On this, Tsze-kung went out and said, "Our Master is not for him."

22. The Master said, "With coarse rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow;-I have still joy in the midst of these things. Riches and honors acquired by unrighteousness, are to me as a floating cloud."

23. The Master said, "If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults."

24. The Master's frequent themes of discourse were-the Odes, the History, and the maintenance of the Rules of Propriety. On all these he frequently discoursed.

25. The Duke of Sheh asked Tsze-lu about Confucius, and Tsze-lu did not answer him.

25 more verses…

About this reader

What is Scripture?

Scripture is a browser-based reader for sixteen sacred texts spanning multiple religious and literary traditions. It provides chapter-by-chapter navigation, full-text search across all works, word concordance with frequency analysis, verse-linked notes, text-to-speech, and deep linking to any chapter or verse.

Traditions Represented

The collection spans Abrahamic, East Asian, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Finnish, and Norse traditions. It includes King James biblical text and Apocrypha, Pickthall's Quran, the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, Legge's Four Books, Tao Te Ching, and Book of Poetry, Chamberlain's Kojiki, West's Bundahishn, Kern's Lotus Sutra, Haug and West's Arda Viraf, Crawford's Kalevala, and Bellows' Poetic Edda.

The committed manifests and chapter files currently describe 121 books, 2,724 chapters, and 63,141 verse records. In poetry and prose works, a verse record can represent a line or paragraph rather than a canonically numbered scriptural verse.

Licensing

The application source is AGPL-3.0. Generated text downloads and their structured arrangement are CC BY-SA 4.0; the underlying historic source texts are treated as public-domain inputs. The corpus metadata therefore describes the distributed arrangement with its CC BY-SA license rather than the Public Domain Mark.

Concordance and Related Passages

The concordance is an exact-word occurrence index with linked records grouped by work. Related Passages is separate: a TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency) cosine-similarity index compares chapter vocabulary after stop-word removal and stores up to five cross-book matches above its threshold. It is a lexical discovery aid, not a claim of historical or theological equivalence.

Deep Linking

Every chapter and verse has a permanent URL. Chapter links follow the pattern /scripture/{work}/{book}-{chapter} (e.g., /scripture/ot/gen-1 for Genesis 1). Verse links append the verse number (e.g., /scripture/ot/gen-1:26 for Genesis 1:26). These URLs can be shared, bookmarked, or cited directly.

Accessibility

Scripture supports keyboard navigation throughout: Tab moves between controls, Enter activates verse actions, and arrow keys navigate chapters. The reading pane has a skip-to-content link. All overlays (search, concordance) are focus-trapped ARIA dialogs. Dynamic content regions use aria-live for screen reader announcements. Light and dark themes are available through the theme toggle. Verse numbers are visible to assistive technology. No flashing content or motion hazards.

Scripture is part of a suite of educational simulations at a9l.im. Explore particle physics with Geon, redistricting with Gerry, or cellular metabolism with Cyano.