Hegel (1815)

The teaching of Confucius... made a great sensation in Leibnitz's time; this teaching is a moral philosophy, we have conversations between Confucius and his followers in which there is nothing definite further than a commonplace moral put in the form of good, sound doctrine...Cicero gives us De Oficiis , a book of moral teaching more comprehensive and better than all the books of Confucius. Confucius is only a man who has a certain amount of practical and wordly wisdom - one with whom there is no speculative philosophy. We may conclude from his original works that for their reputation it would have been better they never been translated.