Quotations and Literature Forum

I've been trying to track down this quote for the last hour or so and have essentially decided to give up but I figured I'd post here and see if someone could find something.

"In the course of a long life a wise man will be prepared to abandon his baggage several times." or something similar. I've seen "called upon" rather than "be prepared", etc. Since it has been attributed to being a Chinese adage, I would think this could be translation.

I'd be impressed and grateful if someone could find an original source for this.

After first trying to post this response, the website told me that I was too new to this group to post the URLs that were in my initial post--therefore I've deleted them. Sigh.

According to the website immediately below, Robert A. Heinlan used the sentence in The Door Into Summer (page 75 of 1964 2d printing).

[DELETED--the site relates to "Science Fiction and Fantasy"]

A few other websites also cite to Heinlan, but not necessarily as the original source. There are a few references sourcing it to Confucius, but they didn't seem to be particularly worthy of reliance. I quickly reviewed the Analects, but couldn't find the concept addressed.

The Tao Te Ching seems to have a slightly different take on "the wise man" and his "baggage." Various translations of Ch. 26, Line 2 are at [DELETED--the site refers to the "Tao Teh Ching"]. One example: