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Who really said it

Riches and honours acquired by unrighteousness are to me as a floating cloud

Spoken by Confucius 551–479 BC · Chinese philosopher & teacher of the state of Lu
Verified against the primary text — the thought is Confucius’s, the Victorian English is his translator’s. Free to reuse

A genuine saying, recorded in the Analects, Book VII — chapter XV in James Legge’s numbering, and passage 16 in the Chinese Text Project’s ↗. The Chinese reads 不義而富且貴，於我如浮雲. One caveat worth carrying: these exact English words are Legge’s 1861 translation, not Confucius’s.

Last verified 4 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Riches and honours acquired by unrighteousness are to me as a floating cloud” Confucius, Analects, Book VII, ch. XV (also numbered 7.16), translated by James Legge in The Chinese Classics, vol. 1 (1861; rev. 1893). Verified against the primary text; the English wording is Legge's. Verbatim: “With coarse rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow;—I have still joy in the midst of these things. Riches and honours acquired by unrighteousness, are to me as a floating cloud.”

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In context

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Provenance

Analects, Book VII — the floating cloud

Work
The Analects (論語), Book VII — 述而 Shù ér
Passage
Chapter XV in Legge’s numbering; passage 16 at the Chinese Text Project (cited as 7.15 or 7.16)
Translation
James Legge (1815–1897), The Chinese Classics, Vol. I — first published 1861, revised second edition 1893
Original
不義而富且貴，於我如浮雲

The Master said, ‘With coarse rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow;—I have still joy in the midst of these things. Riches and honours acquired by unrighteousness, are to me as a floating cloud.’ Analects, Book VII

Legge prints a comma after “unrighteousness”; the form that circulates online drops it. (Watch the spelling too — Legge sets “honours”, while the Chinese Text Project’s copy of his English Americanises it to “honors”.)

Translator’s printed text
Read Legge’s Analects, Book VII, on Wikisource
Analects VII at the Chinese Text Project (Chinese with Legge’s translation)

How we know

Public domain

Both layers are free to use. The Chinese original is an ancient text, and this English wording comes from James Legge’s The Chinese Classics, Vol. I — first published 1861 and revised in 1893, so comfortably before the 1931 US public-domain cutoff ↗. Note that copyright rides on the translation, not the sage: a modern English rendering of the same passage is a separate work with its own rights, so quote Legge’s version if you want it free and clear.

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

Real quote, dangerous neighbourhood

This one is authentic — which, for Confucius, makes it the exception. His name is one of the internet’s most abused attributions, so the useful warnings here are about the company this line keeps, and about whose English you are actually quoting.

James Legge, not Confucius Translation

“Riches and honours acquired by unrighteousness” is English chosen by a Scottish missionary-scholar for an 1861 edition. What Confucius said was 不義而富且貴，於我如浮雲 — eleven characters, as the Chinese Text Project prints them ↗. Credit the sentiment to Confucius; credit the phrasing to Legge.

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life” Fabricated

Stamped with Confucius’s name everywhere and absent from the Analects. Quote Investigator ↗ concludes that “the linkage to Confucius appears to be spurious,” tracing the saying to a 1982 Princeton Alumni Weekly piece and finding the first Confucius credit in Computerworld in June 1985.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” Wrong sage

Wikiquote files this among the misattributions ↗, crediting it to Laozi in the Tao Te Ching — and does the same for “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand,” which it assigns to Xunzi.

“Return good for evil” Inverted

Sold as Confucian wisdom, but he argued against it. The World of Chinese ↗ notes his actual position was 以直报怨，以德报德 — repay injustice with justice, and repay good with good.

The test that settles all of it is simply to open the book. This line is right there in Book VII ↗. Most of the famous ones are not.

Context

Why a cloud?

The sentence lands harder when you read the whole paragraph. Confucius has just described a life of coarse rice, plain water and a bent arm for a pillow, and said he finds joy in the middle of it. Only then does he wave off wealth won by cheating — and notice that he does not wave it off as a temptation heroically resisted.

That is the force of 浮雲, a floating cloud: not evil, just weightless. Riches taken dishonestly do not scandalise him, they simply drift past overhead, belonging to somebody else’s sky. It is a much cooler, stranger line than the moralising it usually gets flattened into.

Not evil — just weightless.

The numbering, and whose English you are reading

Book VII of the Analects is 述而 (Shù ér), named the way all twenty books are — after its own opening words, 述而不作, ‘a transmitter and not a maker.’ The Chinese Text Project ↗ lists it by that romanisation alone, as ‘Shu Er’, and so does Legge. Its chapter numbering is not stable across editions: Legge prints this passage as chapter XV, while the Chinese Text Project lists the identical text as number 16. That is why you will see the same sentence cited as both Analects 7.15 and 7.16 — neither is wrong.

James Legge (1815–1897) produced The Chinese Classics across the 1860s and 70s, with Volume I ↗ — the Analects, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean — appearing in 1861 and again in a revised edition in 1893. His register is the reason so many Confucius quotations sound faintly biblical in English. Eleven characters of terse classical Chinese become “riches and honours acquired by unrighteousness”: accurate, but unmistakably Victorian.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Character Success Justice

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Legge's Analects, Book VII (full text)en.wikisource.org

Legge's The Chinese Classics, Vol. I, with the Chinese printed beside the English. Chapter XV is the floating-cloud passage.
Analects 述而 (Shù ér), Chinese and Englishctext.org

The Chinese Text Project's parallel text; passage 16 carries 不義而富且貴，於我如浮雲 with Legge's rendering.
The Analects of Confucius, trans. James Leggegutenberg.org

Free public-domain ebook of Legge's translation, printing the line at Book VII, Chapter XV.
Quote Investigator: the Confucius filequoteinvestigator.com

QI's collected investigations of sayings wrongly pinned on Confucius. This line is not among them.
Confucius — including the Misattributed sectionen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote's roster of fakes, crediting 'journey of a thousand miles' to Laozi and 'I hear and I forget' to Xunzi.
Things Confucius Never Saidsixthtone.com

Fact-check of sayings misattributed or misread in China itself, including the inverted 'return good for evil.'

The true author

Who Confucius actually was

Confucius

551–479 BC · Chinese philosopher & teacher, state of Lu

Confucius was a philosopher and teacher of the Spring and Autumn period, from the state of Lu in what is now Qufu, Shandong. He did not write the Analects himself — his sayings were gathered by disciples and later followers many years after his death, which is why almost every “Confucius quote” is really a quotation from that compilation, and, in English, from a translator on top of it. His teaching centred on virtue, ritual propriety and the cultivation of character over material advantage, which is exactly the ground this line stands on.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The Analects, Book VII

Confucius. Confucian Analects, Book VII, chap. XV. In The Chinese Classics, vol. 1, translated by James Legge, 1861; revised second edition, 1893. The identical passage is numbered Analects 7.16 by the Chinese Text Project.

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