c. 310 – c. 235 BCE · Chinese Confucian philosopher
Xunzi (Xun Kuang) was a leading Confucian thinker of the late Warring States period, known for a rigorous, this-worldly ethics and for teaching that character is cultivated through practice and ritual rather than innate goodness. The Xunzi chapter Ruxiao contains the oft-cited progression — hearing is less than seeing, seeing less than knowing, knowing less than doing — that later English writers loosely reshaped into the modern “Tell me … involve me and I learn” proverb. He did not, however, write the wording popularly quoted today.