Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderProverb

'Where there is no vision, the people perish' is the King James wording of Proverbs 29:18; here 'vision' means prophetic revelation, not a strategic plan.

Book of Proverbs 29:18, King James Version

Religion & BeliefProverbs

The story behind the card

Modern translations usually say 'revelation' or 'prophetic vision' instead of 'vision', and 'cast off restraint' instead of 'perish'. The Hebrew word, chazon, is the one the Bible uses for a prophet's vision, as in the first verse of the Book of Isaiah. The verse ends 'but he that keepeth the law, happy is he', so its subject is God's word and obedience to it. The Book of Proverbs is a collection of wise sayings traditionally linked to King Solomon. As a business slogan, it loses that meaning.

Türkçe oku
Süleyman'ın Özdeyişleri 29:18, İngilizcenin ünlü King James çevirisinde “Görüm olmayan yerde halk yok olur” diye geçer. Buradaki “görüm” bir kurumun vizyonu değil, peygambere gelen vahiydir.
Kutsal Kitap, Süleyman'ın Özdeyişleri 29:18

Modern çeviriler “görüm” yerine genellikle “vahiy” ya da “peygamberlik görümü”, “yok olur” yerine de “başıboş kalır” der. İbranice sözcük chazon'dur; Kutsal Kitap'ta peygamberlere gelen görümler için kullanılır, örneğin Yeşaya Kitabı'nın ilk ayetinde. Ayetin ikinci yarısı Tanrı'nın yasasına uyanın mutlu olduğunu söyler; yani konusu Tanrı'nın sözü ve ona bağlılıktır. Süleyman'ın Özdeyişleri, geleneksel olarak Kral Süleyman'a bağlanan bilgelik sözlerinden oluşan bir kitaptır. Şirketlerin vizyon sloganı olarak kullanıldığında ayet bu asıl anlamını yitirir.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Book of Proverbs
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

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

StillnessReligion & Belief

The patient dervish reached what he wished for.

“Sabreden derviş muradına ermiş” is one of the best-known Turkish proverbs. A dervish is a member of a Sufi order, Sufism being the mystical tradition of Islam; the Mevlevi order, famous for its whirling ceremony, is one example. Dervishes were known for patience and simple living, so here the dervish stands for anyone who can wait calmly. The Arabic saying “patience is the key to relief” carries the same idea, as does the English “everything comes to those who wait”.

Traditional Turkish sayingRead card
WonderReligion & Belief

The Dead Sea Scrolls, found in caves near Qumran from 1947 onwards, are Jewish manuscripts copied between about the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD. Among them is the Great Isaiah Scroll, from around 125 BC: all 66 chapters of the Book of Isaiah on one scroll more than seven metres long.

The first seven scrolls were found in 1946–47 by Bedouin shepherds in a cave about 1.5 km from the north-western shore of the Dead Sea. By 1956 eleven caves around Qumran had yielded pieces of 981 different manuscripts, mostly in Hebrew, some in Aramaic and Greek. Many scholars link them with the Essenes, a strict Jewish group of the time, though others think they came from Jerusalem priests or other groups. Most survive only as fragments of parchment and papyrus. Copies or pieces of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther have been identified. The Isaiah scroll, 17 sheets of parchment sewn together, is the only Qumran scroll preserved almost whole, and it is about a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew Bible manuscripts known before the discovery. It is kept at the Shrine of the Book in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderPhilosophy

When Friedrich Nietzsche wrote 'God is dead' in The Gay Science (1882), he was not celebrating. He meant that belief in God no longer held European culture together, and that the morals built on it would lose their footing too.

Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher and the son of a Protestant pastor. He put the famous line in the mouth of a madman who runs into a marketplace with a lantern in broad daylight, looking for God. The unbelievers standing around laugh at him, and he tells them that 'we have killed him': modern science and ways of thinking had made the old faith hard to hold. The danger he saw was nihilism, the sense that nothing has value once its old foundation has gone. His answer, developed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), was that people would have to create new values for themselves, an ideal he called the Übermensch, or 'overhuman'. The line became one of the most quoted in modern philosophy, and thinkers from Heidegger to the theologians of the 1960s argued over its meaning.

PhilosophyRead card
WonderPhilosophy

Pascal's wager, set out by the 17th-century French thinker Blaise Pascal, argues that believing in God is the rational bet: if God exists the believer gains infinitely, and if not, little is lost.

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a mathematician and physicist who, with Pierre de Fermat, laid the foundations of probability theory; he also built one of the first mechanical calculators. In later life he turned to religion and began notes for a defence of Christianity. He died before finishing it, and the notes were published in 1670 as the Pensées (“Thoughts”). The wager is not a proof that God exists. It is a decision argument: when reason cannot settle a question, weigh the possible gains and losses of each choice. For that reason it is often described as the first use of decision theory. Critics objected that many religions make similar promises, so the bet does not say which god to back, and that belief cannot simply be chosen. Pascal's answer was to act as believers do until belief follows.

PhilosophyRead card
WonderPhilosophy

When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.

This East African proverb is best known in Swahili, 'Wapiganapo tembo nyasi huumia', and similar versions exist in Gikuyu and other languages of Kenya and Tanzania. Tanzania's first president, Julius Nyerere, used it to describe the Cold War, when rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union was fought out at Africa's expense. It is still quoted whenever powerful sides clash, because those caught in the middle, not the fighters, usually pay the price.

African ProverbRead card
Next card in the archivePer aspera ad astra.Read next →