Confucius says to be good one must be “resolute and firm, simple and slow in speech.” 

From Zhu Xi’s Reading of the Analects: Canon, Commentary and the Classical Tradition by Daniel K. Gardner on Delanceyplace.com.

Confucius (551 – 479 BCE), a Chinese thinker and social philosopher whose influence extends to the present, attempts to define goodness. In the Analects, his definition of goodness starts with the “golden rule,” but he takes his concept further, stating that to be good one must be “resolute and firm, simple and slow in speech.”

“Zhu … wants to understand why this is so. The answer for him is partly that restraint in speech indicates a general self-restraint, which, in turn, indicates that one’s original mind-and-heart, with its endowed true goodness, has been preserved and not won over by selfish desires. … For Zhu, words that are not simple but are artful are evidence that one has become interested in “adorning oneself on the outside in an effort to please others.”