This sentence comes from Ceng Zi's Book of Rites University in the Spring and Autumn Period. The original excerpt is as follows:
Therefore, a gentleman must first be cautious. There are virtues, people, soil, soil, money and money. Virtue is the foundation and wealth is the goal. Outside, fighting for the people. Therefore, if you gather wealth, the people will disperse, and if you scatter wealth, the people will gather. People who say the wrong thing come out and go in; Goods that go in illegally will also go out illegally.
Explain in vernacular Chinese: Therefore, a gentleman should be cautious about Xiu De. Only with virtue can we get people, only with people can we have land, only with land can we have money, and only with money can we enjoy it. Virtue is the foundation, and wealth is the purpose. If putting the cart before the horse, people will fight and rob each other.
Therefore, when wealth is gathered in the hands of the monarch, the people can be dispersed, wealth is evacuated to the people, and the people will gather around the monarch. So if you use unreasonable words to talk about others, others will use unreasonable words to talk about you, and the wealth gained by unreasonable methods will also be taken away by unreasonable methods.
Extended data
"University" was originally the forty-second article of "The Book of Rites of Little Dai", and it was said that it was written. It is actually a Confucian work in Qin and Han Dynasties and an important educational theory work in ancient China.
Later, Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi in the Northern Song Dynasty highly praised Zhu in the Southern Song Dynasty, and he wrote university chapters and sentences, which were finally called the "Four Books" together with The Doctrine of the Mean, The Analects of Confucius and Mencius.
The "Three Outlines" and "Eight Items" put forward in "University" emphasize that self-cultivation is the premise of governing people, and the purpose of self-cultivation is to govern the country and the world, which shows the consistency between governing the country and the world and personal moral cultivation.
The full text is concise, profound and far-reaching. Mainly summarizes the pre-Qin Confucian moral cultivation theory, as well as the basic principles and methods of moral cultivation. It also systematically discusses the political philosophy of Confucianism, which has profound enlightenment for being a man, doing things and governing the country.