The obscurities of the Tao Te Ching have made the many translations of the text go in all kinds of directions. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link). Lao Tzu has a reputation of being cryptic, although he speaks quite plainly and directly in his text.ĩ0 of the most spread false Lao Tzu quotes, why they are false and where they are really from. Now, that book, composed somewhere between the 6th and the 4th century BC, is not an easy one to interpret – neither for the modern Chinese reader nor for those approaching it through a translation. So, a quote claiming to be of Lao Tzu needs to be from that book – or explicitly from another source, if there is one. Just about the only words of Lao Tzu we have are those in the Tao Te Ching (and it's not established beyond a doubt that the text had him or anyone else as the sole author). We can learn also from words falsely claimed to be his.
So, he is a good example of how a skeptical reader can go about testing a quote's authenticity. Some of the fake quotes are close to what Lao Tzu stated in his book, whereas others are absurdly impossible to put in his mouth with any credibility. One legendary mind of the past has been the victim of it more than many others: Lao Tzu (also spelled Laozi), the first Taoist and author of the Tao Te Ching (Daodejing). A popular meme jokes about this: Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying that quotes on the Internet are often false. That also goes for quotes from famous people of the present and the past. In this Internet era, it is important to keep a skeptical mind to the sensations appearing on the web. If you want to skip my introduction and go directly to my texts about the false Lao Tzu quotes, just scroll down or click this link: The great Taoist philosophy classic by Lao Tzu translated, and each of the 81 chapters extensively commented.
Tao Te Ching The Taoism of Lao Tzu Explained.
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Here I go through a bunch of them and discuss how to reveal that they are not authentic. There are lots of quotes of him on the web, but far too many of them are false. Lao Tzu was the first Taoist, legendary writer of the Tao Te Ching.
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