Ikigai Daily
Menu
DriveProverb

The darkest hour is just before the dawn.

English proverb

PhilosophyProverbs

The story behind the card

The earliest known version is by the English clergyman Thomas Fuller, in A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine (1650), a book on the Holy Land: ‘it is always darkest just before the day dawneth’. His example was David, whose own men were ready to stone him shortly before he was proclaimed king. The worst trouble, Fuller meant, often comes just before relief. As astronomy it is not quite right: the night is darkest around its middle, and the sky begins to pale an hour or more before sunrise.

Türkçe oku
Gecenin en karanlık anı, şafak sökmeden hemen öncedir.
İngiliz atasözü

Bilinen en eski biçimi, İngiliz din adamı Thomas Fuller'ın Kutsal Topraklar üzerine yazdığı A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine (1650) adlı kitaptadır: “Gün ağarmadan hemen önce ortalık hep en karanlıktır.” Fuller'a göre en büyük sıkıntı çoğu zaman ferahlıktan hemen önce gelir. Verdiği örnek Davut'tur: Kendi adamları onu taşlamaya hazırdı, ama çok geçmeden kral ilan edildi. Astronomi açısından söz tam doğru değildir: Gece en karanlık hâlini ortasında alır, gökyüzü de güneş doğmadan bir saat ya da daha önce ağarmaya başlar. Türkçedeki “Gün doğmadan neler doğar” sözü de umudun en beklenmedik anda belirebileceğini anlatır.

Sources and further reading

Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

DrivePhilosophy

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

The saying comes from chapter 64 of the Tao Te Ching, the classic of Taoist philosophy traditionally credited to the sage Laozi; its oldest surviving copies date from around 300 BC. Literally, a journey of a thousand li begins beneath your feet; the li is a Chinese measure of distance, today half a kilometre. The same chapter notes that a tree too thick to hug grows from a tiny shoot: great things start small, and are best dealt with while they are still small.

Chinese, Daoist ProverbRead card
DrivePhilosophy

The tongue has no bones, but it can break hearts.

The older form of this proverb says the tongue has no bones, yet it breaks bones: words can hurt as much as blows. An Italian-English dictionary of 1760 gives it as “La lingua non ha osso, e osso fa rompere”; Greek has it too, and the Ottoman statesman and scholar Ahmed Vefik Pasha recorded “Dilin kemiği yok, kemiği kırar” in his 19th-century collection of Turkish proverbs. Swahili says simply “Ulimi hauna mfupa”, the tongue has no bone. The ending about hearts seems to be a later English variant.

Persian, Turkish, Arabic variants ProverbRead card
DrivePhilosophy

He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything.

English quotation books have called this an “Arabian proverb” since at least the 1860s; Tryon Edwards's A Dictionary of Thoughts (1891) is one, but these books give no Arabic original, so the label is best taken loosely. The idea is widely shared: good health gives people the strength to plan and to recover from setbacks. Turkish says “Her şeyin başı sağlık”, health comes first, and when a glass breaks people say “Sağlık olsun”: never mind, as long as everyone is well.

Spanish, Arabic variants ProverbRead card
DrivePhilosophy

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

The pairing is usually called a Japanese proverb, but no Japanese original has been found. It appears in English-language business books from the mid-1990s; “vision” here means a clear idea of where you want to get to. An older saying on the same theme was already in church papers in the 1920s: “A vision without a task is but a dream; a task without a vision is drudgery.” It is often said to come from an 18th-century English church inscription, but that is unconfirmed too.

Anonymous saying; widely circulated as a Japanese proverb, with no specific Japanese source identifiedRead card
DrivePhilosophy

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for life.

Often called an ancient Chinese proverb, the saying has no known Chinese source. Its earliest known version is in Mrs Dymond (1885), a novel by Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray: give a man a fish and he is hungry again in an hour; teach him to catch one and you do him a good turn. “Feed him for a lifetime” appears by 1961. The idea is older: the 12th-century Jewish scholar Maimonides ranked highest the help that lets a poor person support himself.

Chinese, widely attributed ProverbRead card
Next card in the archive“Wherever you go, go with all your heart.” It is a popular modern saying often attributed to Confucius, but no reliable passage in the Confucian classics has been identified as its source.Read next →