📖 Meaning
Doing things with both a good beginning and a good ending. It describes handling affairs earnestly and thoroughly, seeing every task through from start to finish with consistent care and dedication.
📜 Origin Story
The phrase originates from the Zhuangzi (《庄子·大宗师》), a Daoist text from the Warring States period, where it appears as '善妖善老，善始善终' — advocating that one treat both youth and old age, beginning and end, with equal care. The historian Sima Qian later employed it in the Records of the Grand Historian (《史记·陈丞相世家》) when praising Chen Ping, a chancellor of the early Han dynasty who preserved his honorable reputation until death. Sima Qian rhetorically asked whether such a man, ending in glory and hailed as a wise chancellor, did not embody '善始善终'. These sources together established the idiom's sense of carrying a task through with equal devotion at both its start and its close.
💡 Example Usage
做任何工作都要善始善终，不能半途而废。
Whatever work you do, you should see it through from beginning to end, not abandon it halfway.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 善始善终
- Pinyin: shàn shǐ shàn zhōng
- Literal Translation: good, beginning, good, end
- Category: Quality
- Characters: 4