QuoteProject
If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children.
Confucius
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote emphasizes the importance of long-term thinking and investment in education for future generations.

Confucius highlights the varying scope of investment based on the time frame of one's plans. For short-term goals, one can engage in immediate actions like planting rice; for mid-term goals, tree planting represents the establishment of enduring resources. However, for the longest horizon—one hundred years—he points to the education of children as the most significant endeavor, as it shapes the future of society and ensures the continuity of knowledge and values.

Themes

EducationLong-TermPlanningChildrenFuture

In practice

Example use cases

During a keynote speech about the importance of sustainable development.

More from Confucius

Speak the truth, do not yield to anger; give, if thou art asked for little; by these three steps thou wilt go near the gods.
ConfuciusRead
Earnest in practicing the ordinary virtues, and careful in speaking about them, if, in his practice, he has anything defective, the superior man dares not but exert himself; and if, in his words, he has any excess, he dares not allow himself such license.
ConfuciusRead
When you see a good person, think of becoming like her/him. When you see someone not so good, reflect on your own weak points.
ConfuciusRead
Never give a sword to a man who can't dance.
ConfuciusRead
The superior man is distressed by the limitations of his ability; he is not distressed by the fact that men do not recognize the ability that he has.
ConfuciusRead
Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.
ConfuciusRead

Similar quotes

If someone has children, the first thing they want is for them to be happy, and then become someone in life and all that. But the educational system, I mean always, not just now, creates competitive, successful people, and does not educate them to be happy. The problem is that success gives money, not happiness. The eternal problem.
Jorge BucayRead
A diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome can be useful to help a person understand why they have had difficulties.
Simon Baron-CohenRead
As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.
Parker J. PalmerRead
A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.
Alberto ManguelRead
We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.
Henry MillerRead
Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
Iris MurdochRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.