Ikigai Daily
Menu
DriveProverb

Practice makes the master.

German proverb

ProverbsMind

The story behind the card

In German: 'Übung macht den Meister.' The word Meister comes from the old craft guilds, in which an apprentice (Lehrling) became a journeyman (Geselle) and, after years of work, could qualify as a master. The proverb packs that path into four words: skill is built by repetition, not handed out as a gift. English says 'practice makes perfect'.

Türkçe oku
Çalışa çalışa usta olunur.
Alman atasözü

Almancası: “Übung macht den Meister.” Meister (usta) sözü eski zanaat loncalarından gelir: Çırak (Lehrling) önce kalfa (Geselle) olur, yıllarca çalıştıktan sonra ustalığa yükselebilirdi. Anadolu'daki Ahi loncalarında da aynı çırak, kalfa, usta basamakları vardı. Atasözü bu yolu dört kelimeye sığdırır: Ustalık doğuştan verilmez, tekrar ede ede kazanılır. İngilizler “practice makes perfect” der; Türkçede de yakın bir söz vardır: “İşleyen demir pas tutmaz.”

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Guild
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

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

DrivePhilosophy

A sound mind in a sound body.

The phrase comes from the tenth Satire of the Roman poet Juvenal, written in the early 2nd century AD. The poem mocks people who pray for wealth, power, fame, beauty or a long life, since such wishes often bring ruin. If you must pray, Juvenal says, ask for “mens sana in corpore sano”, a sound mind in a sound body, and a brave heart that does not fear death. It later became a motto of sport, and in Turkey its Turkish form is often credited to Atatürk, the republic's founder.

Latin, Roman ProverbRead card
DriveProverbs

Patience and work wear down every obstacle.

In Russian: 'Терпение и труд всё перетрут' (terpeniye i trud vsyo peretrut), literally 'patience and labour will grind through everything'. The rhyme of trud and peretrut makes it easy to remember, and it is one of the best-known Russian proverbs. Russian has a companion saying about water, 'a drop wears away stone', and the same image appears in the Latin 'gutta cavat lapidem'.

Russian ProverbRead card
StillnessMind

A watched pot never boils.

Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1785 that 'a watched pot is slow to boil' and credited it to his Poor Richard, though it appears in none of the almanacs. The familiar wording is in Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Mary Barton (1848). The water boils just as fast either way; what changes is how long the wait feels. Psychologists Delwin Cahoon and Ed Edmonds tested it in 1980: people asked to watch a pot and say when it boiled judged a four-minute interval as longer than people given no such task.

English ProverbRead card
StillnessMind

The axe forgets; the tree remembers.

This proverb comes from the Shona people of Zimbabwe. The linguist G. Fortune of the University of Cape Town recorded it in his 1955 grammar of the Shona language, where the one that does not forget is the tree stump. The poet Maya Angelou used the short form 'The ax forgets. The tree remembers.' in a 1997 essay collection, which helped spread it in English. It describes the two sides of harm: the one who strikes can forget quickly, while the one who was hurt carries the mark for years.

African ProverbRead card
WonderMind

You cannot wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

This saying is often labelled Native American or Navajo, but its recorded history points elsewhere. A close version appeared in a Calcutta newspaper in 1888, and Mahatma Gandhi used it in 1928; collectors later found similar proverbs among the Yoruba of Nigeria, the Oromo of Ethiopia and in Somalia. The Navajo label appears only in the 1990s. Its logic travels well: a sleeper wakes when called, but someone who is pretending has chosen not to hear, and more noise will not change that.

Native American, widely attributed ProverbRead card
Next card in the archiveLittle by little, the bird builds its nest.Read next →