This one is real. It is Analects Book XVII (“Yang Huo”), chapter 2 — in Chinese, 子曰：性相近也，習相遠也 — and the exact English wording is James Legge’s, from The Chinese Classics, Volume I (1861; revised second edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893). The sentence you see quoted online is Legge’s Victorian rendering, not Confucius’s words; and like everything in the Analects, it was written down by followers after his death.
“By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart” Confucius, The Analects XVII.2, translated by James Legge (The Chinese Classics, Vol. I, 1861; revised 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893). Verified via Quotle.info
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Provenance
The source
Work
The Analects (Lunyu), Book XVII “Yang Huo,” chapter 2
Original
子曰：性相近也，習相遠也
Translation
James Legge, The Chinese Classics, Vol. I — 1861; revised 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893
Compiled
By Confucius’s disciples and followers after his death; largely composed in the Warring States period, final form mid-Han
CHAP. II. The Master said, ‘By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.’ CHAP. III. The Master said, ‘There are only the wise of the highest class, and the stupid of the lowest class, who cannot be changed.’
Analects XVII.2–3
Legge prints these as consecutive chapters of Book XVII. Chapter III is almost never quoted alongside chapter II, which is a pity — read together, the famous line comes with its own exception clause.
The Chinese Text Project ↗ sets chapter 2 of Yang Huo — 子曰：性相近也，習相遠也 — beside the English “The Master said, ‘By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart,’” crediting James Legge as translator.
Wikisource’s transcription ↗ of Legge’s Chinese Classics Vol. I prints the sentence verbatim at Book XVII, chapter II, and the Confucian Analects front matter ↗ notes it is “a section of Vol. I of Legge’s Chinese Classics (1861), reprinted in 1893,” with external Google Books and archive.org scans linked. Note that the transcription is typed rather than proofread against the scan — Wikisource still flags the 1893 Vol. I djvu as the scan-backed version to migrate to.
Wikipedia’s Analects article ↗ lists Legge’s translation — The Chinese Classics, Vol. I, London: Trübner, 1861, with a revised second edition in 1893 from Oxford’s Clarendon Press — and Wikisource’s edition list ↗ gives Vol. I as “1861 & 1893 (2nd ed.).”
A cross-check on a second reading text: monadnock.net’s Book 17 ↗, explicitly headed “translated by James Legge (1893),” carries the identical sentence at chapter 2.
✓Public domain
Both halves are free to reuse. The Chinese original is ancient, and the English is James Legge’s, first published in The Chinese Classics, Volume I in 1861 and reprinted in his revised second edition of 1893 — both long before the 1931 threshold for US public domain. Note that this applies to Legge’s wording specifically: a modern translation of the same line would carry its own copyright.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What usually goes wrong with this one
This is not a fake Confucius quote — it is in the Analects, exactly where people say it is. What gets misattributed is the English, and the citation almost always evaporates on the way to the quote sites.
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The wordingJames Legge, not Confucius translation
Confucius said 性相近也，習相遠也. “By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart” is the missionary-sinologist James Legge’s English, from The Chinese Classics ↗. Other translators phrase it entirely differently — Wikiquote ↗ notes alternate Analects translations by Leonard A. Lyall (1909) and William Edward Soothill (1910) alongside Legge’s.
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The citationQuote aggregators no source
AZQuotes ↗ sources it to “Confucius (2013). ‘Confucian Analects, The Great Learning & The Doctrine of the Mean’, p.318, Courier Corporation” — a modern reprint, with no translator and no chapter named. The Quotations Page ↗ gives only “The Confucian Analects,” also with no translator. Legge disappears entirely.
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The authorshipConfucius the writer compiled
Confucius wrote none of it. Wikipedia ↗ is explicit that aphorisms concerning his teachings were compiled into the Analects only many years after his death, by his disciples and followers. Book XVII also falls among the last five books that the Qing philologist Cui Shu argued on linguistic grounds were produced much later than the rest ↗.
✓The saying is genuinely Confucian and genuinely in the book, at Analects XVII.2 ↗. Credit the thought to Confucius — and the sentence to James Legge.
Context
Why it mattered
Strip away the Victorian phrasing and this is one of the load-bearing sentences in Confucian thought: people start out much the same, and it is practice — habit, training, the company you keep — that pulls them apart. It is an argument for education as the thing that actually makes a person, and it is why Confucius is so often read as an optimist about human potential.
Legge prints the next chapter immediately after, and it pointedly narrows the claim: only the very wisest and the very dullest, the Master says, cannot be changed. The two sentences are almost always quoted apart, which makes the first sound more sweeping than it reads on the page.
By nature, near together. By practice, far apart.
The line outside the Analects
The same six characters — 性相近，習相遠 — stand in the opening of the Three Character Classic (Sanzijing), the Chinese children’s primer probably written in the 13th century and mainly attributed to Wang Yinglin (1223–1296): its first four verses run “People at birth, / Are naturally good, / Their natures are similar, / (But) their habits make them different,” the third and fourth of which are this phrase. That primer is how generations of Chinese schoolchildren met the idea, though Wikipedia’s account of the text ↗ credits the philosophy it states to Mencius.
Book XVII sits in the part of the Analects scholars trust least. The Qing dynasty philologist Cui Shu argued on linguistic grounds that the last five books were produced much later ↗ than the rest of the work, and Arthur Waley theorised that Books 3–9 are the earliest layer. None of that makes the saying a forgery — it is in every standard text of the Analects — but it is worth knowing before calling it Confucius’s own voice.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
c. 551 – 479 BC · Chinese teacher and philosopher; his sayings became the Analects
Confucius was a Chinese teacher and philosopher who died around 479 BC. He wrote none of the book he is famous for — aphorisms concerning his teachings were compiled into the Analects by his disciples and followers, but not until many years after his death, with large portions composed during the Warring States period and the text reaching its final form in the mid-Han dynasty. That gap is why even a genuine Confucius line like this one is best described as recorded from him rather than written by him.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this
Confucius. The Analects (Lunyu), book 17 (“Yang Huo”), chap. 2. In James Legge, trans., The Chinese Classics, Vol. I: Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean. 1861; revised 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/by-nature-men-are-nearly-alike-by-practice-they-get-to-be/