Ikigai Daily
Menu
StillnessQuote

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

Duc de Lévis, 1808 (often credited to Voltaire)

Philosophy

The story behind the card

This line is almost always credited to Voltaire, but it has never been found in his works. Its closest known source is a French maxim published in 1808 by Pierre-Marc-Gaston, Duc de Lévis, a nobleman and writer: it is easier, he wrote, to judge a man's mind by his questions than by his answers. The shorter form later picked up Voltaire's name, which suited a writer famous for challenging received ideas. The thought still holds: an answer can be memorised or borrowed, while a good question shows how someone actually thinks.

Türkçe oku
Bir insanı verdiği cevaplardan çok sorduğu sorulara bakarak yargıla.
Duc de Lévis, 1808 (genellikle Voltaire'e atfedilir)

Bu söz hemen her yerde Voltaire'e atfedilir, ama onun eserlerinde hiç bulunamamıştır. Bilinen en yakın kaynağı, Fransız soylu ve yazar Pierre-Marc-Gaston, Duc de Lévis'nin 1808'de yayımladığı özdeyişlerdir. Lévis, bir insanın aklını cevaplarından çok sorularıyla yargılamanın daha kolay olduğunu yazmıştı. Söz sonradan kısaldı ve yerleşik fikirlere meydan okumasıyla tanınan Voltaire'in adıyla dolaşmaya başladı. Fikir ise hâlâ geçerli: Bir cevap ezberlenebilir ya da başkasından alınabilir, ama iyi bir soru insanın gerçekte nasıl düşündüğünü gösterir.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Voltaire
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
StillnessLiterature

The wound is where the light enters you.

The sentence condenses lines by Coleman Barks, the American poet whose free versions made Rumi a bestseller in English; Barks did not read Persian and reworked scholarly translations. His poem “Childhood Friends” (1990) urges the reader to keep looking at “the bandaged place”, where the light enters. It draws on the Masnavi of Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic of Konya, who tells the wounded not to turn away from the plaster a spiritual guide lays on them: the healing comes from its light, not from themselves.

Attributed to Rumi; exact English sentence not matched to a standard textRead 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
StillnessLiterature

The rose's lover must endure the thorn.

The Turkish Language Association's dictionary explains that people put up with the troubles that come with someone, or some work, they love. The rose and its thorn are an old pair in Turkish and Persian poetry; in classical Ottoman verse the nightingale longs for the rose, and the thorn often stands for the pain of love. English has “No rose without a thorn”, as does Turkish, “Dikensiz gül olmaz”, but this proverb adds that whoever loves the rose accepts its thorn.

Turkish, Persian 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
Next card in the archiveThe perfect is the enemy of the good.Read next →