Loves himself but does not exalt himself. Therefore he leaves that and chooses this. Thus the sage : Acts, but is not concerned with the results. Accomplishes his tasks, but does not dwell on them. He does not desire to display his virtue. Thus the sage says : Accepting upon oneself the disgrace of the nation Is called being master of the shrines. Accepting upon oneself the misfortune of the nation Is called being king of the world. Thus the sage : Holds the left side of an agreement, But does not demand payment of people. The sage does not accumulate things – Since through serving people, the more one has; Since through giving to people, one has even more. The Way of the sage acts yet does not strive. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). You are free to download this work and share it with others as long as I retain credit for the work. But you cannot change or build on this work in any way, or use it commercially (that is, for your profit), without my permission. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Dao De Jing, by Lao Zi