By exploring Confucius’ attitude towards time, change, and transformation in the “Analects”, this paper aims to illustrate that temporality plays a crucial role in Confucian ethics. Confucius uses the notion of timeliness as an ethical guide in self-cultivation and moral practice in order to harmonize human beings with all the events of change. This paper argues that timely sagehood is a key quality of the junzi or “excellent person.” To be a timely sage, a junzi must cultivate the virtue of yi. This paper presents a conceptualization of “yi” in the “Analects” and proposes that its meanings limited to “righteousness” and “appropriateness” in the sense of morality, legitimacy and justice, include a sense of timeliness, namely, the quality of timely action and the inner intellectual capacity of a junzi to evaluate and work out the appropriate course of an action in an actual situation.