Early Life
Li Si was originally from Shang Cai (上蔡) in the State of Chu. As a young man he was a minor functionary in the local administration of Chu. According to the Records of the Great Historian, one day Li Si observed that rats in the outhouse were dirty and hungry but the rats in the barnhouse were well fed. He suddenly realized that "there is no set standard for honor since everyone's life is different. The values of people are determined by their social status. And like rats, people's social status often depends purely on the random life events around them. And so instead of always being restricted by moral codes, people should do what they deemed best at the moment." He made up his mind to take up politics as a career, which was a common choice for scholars not from a noble family during the Warring States Period.
Li Si was unable to advance his career in Chu. He believed that achieving nothing in life while being so intelligent and educated would bring shame to not just himself but to all scholars. After having finished his education with the famous Confucian thinker Xun Zi, he moved to the State of Qin, the most powerful state at that time in an attempt to advance his political career.
Read more about this topic: Li Si
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“An early dew woos the half-opened flowers”
—Unknown. The Thousand and One Nights.
AWP. Anthology of World Poetry, An. Mark Van Doren, ed. (Rev. and enl. Ed., 1936)
“When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)