If 莫過於 doesn't start sentence, how it means "nothing can surpass ..."?
The thing is, Chinese and English are so different that you would rarely see a sentence that can be translated word-by-word and in the original order, without sounding unnatural.
For example, Wiktionary defines 什么 as &quot;what&quot;. But can we translate 你在做什么? (what are you doing?) without rearranging elements in the sentence? No, usually we can't. Does that change the fact that 什么 means what in this sentence?
I'd argue that the English translation actually has the ellipsis right. Think about it this way, ellipsis means something needs to go in there. And in English, you start the sentence with nothing is more, so there is no need for an ellipsis to appear before the phrase, because there is nothing before it in the final sentence.