The Great Man Is He Who

From Mengzi 4B:12, in a series of short standalone aphorisms. The key term is chìzǐ zhī xīn (赤子之心), literally "the heart of a newborn infant," signifying original moral purity before the world's corruption takes hold. Mencius, building on Confucius's ethics, argued that human nature is innately good, and that moral cultivation consists not in acquiring virtue from outside but in preserving and nurturing what one already possesses from birth.