Analects 17.25: 陽貨 (Yang Huo)
Confucius and his disciples · Classical Chinese original · new English translation and commentary by Text Atlas
Overview
Book 17 puts learning under pressure: Confucius faces invitations to serve amid rebellion, and students question his choices. A sequence on six qualities shows how even humaneness, trustworthiness, and courage can go wrong without learning. Poetry, music, and ritual recur as practices that shape feeling and conduct; polished speech and respectable appearances repeatedly come under suspicion. The mourning debate asks whether ritual’s duration answers to gratitude and grief as well as to public continuity. The closing sayings rank rightness above courage, make room for moral hatred, generalize harshly about women and petty people, and treat a person’s reputation at forty as settled.
Analects 17.25
子曰、唯女子與小人、為難養也、近之則不孫、遠之則怨。
The Master said, “Only women and petty people are hard to manage. Bring them close, and they become insolent; keep them at a distance, and they resent it.”
Commentary
translation Women, petty people, and dependence 女子 means women; 小人 can carry a judgment of moral pettiness or a distinction of lower status. 養 concerns supporting, keeping, or managing people. Legge chooses a narrower social reading, girls and servants. “Women and petty people” keeps the broader terms, while the instructions about closeness and distance suggest an unequal relationship with people under one’s care or authority. The setting is not specified.
Basis: translation-comparison
Confidence: medium
ethics The generalization remains visible The saying groups women with 小人 and judges both from the position of someone who controls their closeness or distance. It presents insolence and resentment as their characteristic responses. This is a disparaging gendered and hierarchical generalization. No particular woman, incident, or household is named, so restricting the claim to a particular person would require evidence beyond the sentence. Its wording and the uncertainty about 小人 should be read together.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: high