Grand 文言文 Reading Project - useful or interesting sentences

[Humblegeoff]

Realizing that we have a wide variation in experience within the group, we thought it would be handy to build up a library of sentences that members come across with particularly useful, interesting, elegant, curious or baffling vocabulary and constructions, partly to use around the edges of the main text in our meetings, but also as a resource outside the group. Please feel free to post, translate, analyze and generally discuss these.

[Humblegeoff]

From the opening of Shiji 74, 孟子荀卿列傳:

太史公曰：余讀孟子書，至梁惠王問「何以利吾國」，未嘗不廢書而嘆也 (ctext.org).

[Humblegeoff]

The opening of the Hanfeizi:

臣聞不知而言不智，知而不言不忠，為人臣不忠當死，言而不當亦當死。雖然，臣願悉言所聞，唯大王裁其罪 (ctext.org).

[skylee]

Several years ago I started a thread here called Fundamental Classical Chinese (I didn't dare use any words like "grand", you see ). The response was not that great, and people questioned the purpose of the thread. It didn't seem to do much good. And I feel the same about this thread. But this is just what I feel.

[Humblegeoff]

You might be right, skylee - we agreed in the group that selecting sentences might be useful for us, and it seemed sensible to use the forum to make them easily available, but I'm not sure how much use they'll be outside our little (sorry, Grand) huddle.

Hmmm... having just looked at your very impressive thread (which while it didn't last that long did get quite a few positive responses), I suppose one difference is that we're only intending to post very short chunks of text - sentences and the like - which might be useful for some of our group (and maybe other people) who don't currently have the time or confidence to approach longer texts.