10 Chinese Proverbs About Strength That Will Give You Chills

Unshakeable despite adversity

Literal: Broken a hundred times, never bending

Cai Yong wrote it on Qiao Xuan's memorial stele: his nature was grave, he disliked show and held to the plain, and he had the bearing of a man who could be broken (折) a hundred (百) times and would not (不) bend (挠), who faced a crisis and could not be moved from his ground. 折 is setbacks rather than ...

Overcome all obstacles

Literal: Cut thorns break brambles

The History of the Later Han records Emperor Guangwu presenting Feng Yi to his court as the man who had been his registrar when he first raised troops: 为吾披荆棘，定关中 — he cut through the thorns for me and settled the land within the passes. The four-character idiom grew out of that sentence, adding 斩, t...

Courage under pressure

Literal: Face danger without fear

Meeting (临) danger (危) without (不) fear (惧). The formulation descends from the Zhuangzi's praise of the man who faces great peril without alarm, and it hardened into a standard term of commendation in later histories and biographies. What it denotes is composure under threat rather than absence of t...

Press on despite awareness of challenges

Literal: Know difficulty yet advance

To know (知) the difficulty (难) and advance (进) anyway. It is built as the deliberate opposite of 知难而退, withdrawing in the face of difficulty, and the pair is used against each other constantly in Chinese. What both share is the first half: the knowing is not in dispute, and the phrase specifically e...

Strive continuously for self-improvement

Literal: Self-strengthen without ceasing

This motivational idiom advocates constantly (不息) strengthening (强) oneself (自), originating from the Classic of Changes during the early Zhou Dynasty. It represented one of the fundamental virtues attributed to Heaven's ceaseless motion and energy. Confucian scholars later emphasized it as the supe...

Endure hardship for future success

Literal: Sleep on firewood, taste gall

Goujian of Yue, beaten and made to serve Fuchai of Wu, was let home and set about not forgetting it. The Records of the Grand Historian describes what he did: he hung a gall bladder (胆) where he sat, and looked up at it whenever he sat or lay down, and tasted (尝) it before every meal. The brushwood ...

Heroically reversing catastrophic situation

Literal: Pull back raging tides

Han Yu, in the piece usually called On the Advancement of Learning, has a student praise his teacher for damming the hundred rivers and turning back the wild wave (狂澜) after it has already broken — 回狂澜于既倒. The four characters used today are a later compression of that line. To use force (力) to haul ...

Indomitable; unyielding

Literal: Neither bend nor yield

Neither (不) bending (屈) nor (不) yielding (挠). 屈 is to bend something that ought to be straight and 挠 is to give way under a load, so the two halves cover pressure applied from outside and pressure that comes from the weight itself. Doubling the negation is the whole rhetorical move: nothing is asser...

Press forward courageously

Literal: Once going, nothing ahead can stop

Going forward (一往) with nothing (无) in front (前). The phrase is grammatically ambiguous in a productive way: nothing ahead can be read as no obstacle standing there, or as nothing being looked at except the objective. Both senses are in use. It belongs to military language and to exhortation, and it...

Travel through hardship; overcome obstacles

Literal: Climb mountains, ford waters

Scrambling over (跋) mountains (山) and wading (涉) rivers (水). Both verbs are specific about effort — 跋 is a hard slog on foot, 涉 is going through water rather than over it — so what is named is travel that had to be done with the body. It covers a whole journey rather than a single obstacle, which is...