Tao Te Ching Chapter 29: Acting Without Force

The chapter states its warning flatly: those who wish to take the world and act upon it, I see they cannot succeed. The world is a sacred vessel that cannot be acted upon or grasped — those who act upon it ruin it; those who grasp it lose it. 'World' here is anything with its own living order: a society, an organisation, a family, another person. Treat such things as raw material for your improving hands, and the improvement destroys what it handles.

The middle lines explain why mastery-by-force must fail: among all things, some lead and some follow, some breathe gently and some hard, some are strong and some weak, some rise and some fall. Reality is irreducibly various and in motion; any single scheme imposed on it will fit some of it and crush the rest. Hence the sage's restraint, stated as the chapter's whole ethic: he avoids extremes, excess, and extravagance. Not passivity — but the surgeon's knowledge of how much intervention a living thing can bear.