Philosophy: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 3

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The frog in the well knows nothing of the great ocean.

The Japanese proverb, 井の中の蛙大海を知らず (i no naka no kawazu taikai o shirazu), goes back to the Zhuangzi, a classic of Chinese philosophy named after the thinker Zhuang Zhou (4th century BC). Its chapter “Autumn Floods” says you cannot talk about the sea to a frog in a well, which knows only its well. Later in the chapter a frog boasts of its well to a turtle from the Eastern Sea, who describes a sea that years of flood and drought never changed. The frog is lost for words.

Japanese, Chinese variants ProverbRead card

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A tiger dies and leaves its skin. A person dies and leaves their name.

In Korean the proverb runs “Horangineun jugeoseo gajugeul namgigo, sarameun jugeoseo ireumeul namginda”. Korean collections explain it as advice to do good while you live, so that your name is honoured after you are gone. An older Chinese form has a leopard instead of a tiger. According to the 11th-century historian Ouyang Xiu, Wang Yanzhang, a plain-spoken general of the early 10th century, often said that a leopard dies and leaves its skin, and a person dies and leaves a name.

Korean ProverbRead card

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Even monkeys fall from trees.

In Japanese the proverb is 猿も木から落ちる (saru mo ki kara ochiru): even a monkey falls from a tree. Japanese dictionaries explain it simply: even an expert sometimes fails. It was in print by 1638, in a collection of comic verse, and it is still a kind thing to say when a skilled friend slips up. Japanese has close cousins: even Kōbō, a great calligrapher of the 9th century, made slips of the brush, and even a kappa, a water creature of folklore, can be swept away by a river.

Japanese ProverbRead card

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Beginning is half the task.

In Korean the proverb is 시작이 반이다 (sijagi banida): the beginning is half. Ancient Greece knew the same saying: Plato quotes it in his Laws as a proverb and adds that a beginning is really more than half. The Roman poet Horace put it into verse as “dimidium facti qui coepit habet”: whoever has begun has half done. The proverb is said to anyone putting off a daunting job, because starting is often the hardest part.

Korean proverbRead card

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The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

It is often presented as an ancient Chinese proverb, but Quote Investigator, a website that traces the origins of quotations, found no Chinese source. The earliest close match it found is in a Cleveland newspaper in 1967, where a city councilman, George W. White, used it with “thirty years ago” and did not claim it as his own. The “Chinese proverb” label appears only in 1985. Whoever coined it, the sense is practical: the best moment may have passed, but starting today still beats waiting.

Anonymous saying; often labelled a Chinese proverb, but no supporting Chinese source has been identifiedRead card

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One generation plants the trees. Another gets the shade.

The Chinese proverb runs “qián rén zāi shù, hòu rén chéng liáng”: those before us plant the trees, those after us enjoy the shade. A form of it was listed among everyday sayings in 1751, in Zhai Hao's collection Tongsu bian. The thought is older still: the Roman statesman Cicero, in his essay On Old Age, quotes the comic poet Caecilius Statius on a farmer who plants trees to benefit another generation. It suits any work done for later generations, from schools to forests.

Chinese proverbRead card

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The tree laden with fruit always bends low.

Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886) was a Hindu mystic from Bengal whose followers recorded his sayings; this one is no. 235 in the Oxford scholar Max Müller's Ramakrishna: His Life and Sayings (1898). The image is far older in India: a verse in the Sanskrit poet Kalidasa's play Shakuntala, from the 4th or 5th century, says that trees bow low under their fruit, as good people stay humble in prosperity. English has the same proverb: the boughs that bear most hang lowest, recorded by Thomas Fuller in 1732.

Sri Ramakrishna -- often circulated as an anonymous Indian proverbRead card

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A guest sees more in an hour than the host sees in a year.

English proverb collections list this saying as Polish, and sometimes as Indian, but no original has been traced in Polish or in any Indian language. Yiddish has a rhyming cousin: a guest for a while sees for a mile. Anyone who has had visitors knows the feeling: after a year in a flat you stop seeing the cracked tile or the crooked picture, and a friend spots both before taking off their coat. That is the proverb's point: fresh eyes notice what familiarity hides.

Proverb of uncertain originRead card

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When an elephant is in trouble, even a frog will kick him.

English collections list this as an Indian or Hindu proverb, though its original wording has not been traced. The picture is plain: while the elephant is strong, no frog would dare touch it; once it is stuck or hurt, even the smallest creature joins in. People say it when a boss, a champion or a star loses power and critics who kept quiet suddenly speak up. In one of Aesop's fables, an old, feeble lion kicked by a donkey says the insult is like dying twice.

Indian ProverbRead card

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Knowledge is a treasure, but practice is the key to it.

This is saying no. 3139 in Gnomologia (1732), a collection of about six and a half thousand proverbs, maxims and witty sayings, old and new, British and foreign. Its compiler was Thomas Fuller (1654–1734), an English physician who practised at Sevenoaks in Kent. Fuller gathered sayings rather than inventing them, so this one may be older than his book. Practice here means putting knowledge to use: what you have learnt stays locked away until you apply it.

Thomas Fuller (compiler), Gnomologia (1732), no. 3139Read card

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Fortune favours the bold.

This Latin proverb has several forms. The playwright Terence used “fortes fortuna adiuvat” in his comedy Phormio in 161 BC, and the orator Cicero later called it an old proverb. In Virgil's epic the Aeneid, the warrior Turnus cries “audentis Fortuna iuvat” as he urges his men to attack. Fortuna was the Roman goddess of luck, so the line first meant that the goddess herself takes the side of the brave. Today it is the motto of many regiments, schools and families.

Latin, Ancient Roman ProverbRead card

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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

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The gods help those who help themselves.

The saying began in ancient Greece, where it may already have been a proverb. The Athenian playwright Sophocles wrote that heaven never helps those who will not act, and in Aesop's fable of Hercules and the Wagoner, a driver whose wagon is stuck prays to Hercules and is told to get to work himself. The English form with “God” goes back to the 17th-century political writer Algernon Sidney; Benjamin Franklin printed it in Poor Richard's Almanack in 1736. It is not in the Bible.

Ancient Greek, later English formRead card

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Do not judge a person until you have walked in their shoes.

The line is usually called Native American wisdom, but no Native American source for it is known. It is often traced instead to “Judge Softly”, a poem credited to Mary T. Lathrap (1838–1895), an American preacher who campaigned against alcohol and for women's right to vote. The poem asks readers to walk a mile in another person's moccasins before criticising them, but where and when it first appeared has not been established. Versions use both moccasins and shoes.

Saying of uncertain origin; often credited to Mary T. LathrapRead card

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The one who climbs the highest tree sees the furthest, but also falls the hardest.

This line is widely shared as a Persian proverb, but no Persian original has been found for it. A genuine Persian proverb makes a related point with a roof instead of a tree: har ke bāmash bish, barfash bishtar, the bigger your roof, the more snow it carries. The higher you rise, the further you see, and the more you have to carry and to lose. A newly promoted manager knows the feeling: the whole company comes into view, and so does every problem in it.

Persian proverbRead card

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Do not stand in a dangerous place hoping not to be hit.

This line circulates in English as an Ethiopian proverb, but no Ethiopian original has been traced. The same advice is much older in the Talmud, the great collection of Jewish law and teaching: Rabbi Yannai, a 3rd-century teacher, said that no one should stand in a place of danger counting on a miracle, and he would inspect a ferry before crossing in it. The point is simple: step away from avoidable danger instead of trusting luck to spare you.

Ethiopian proverbRead card

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The graveyard is full of people who thought they were indispensable.

In May 1907 the American writer Elbert Hubbard wrote in his magazine The Philistine that the graveyards are full of people the world could not do without. Hubbard was a writer, publisher and founder of the Roycroft community of craftspeople in East Aurora, New York. A version with “indispensable” was used in the Irish parliament in 1924, about Dublin's Glasnevin Cemetery. The line is often credited to the French leaders Charles de Gaulle or Georges Clemenceau, but the evidence for either is weak.

Anonymous saying; earliest documented close form: Elbert Hubbard, The Philistine (1907)Read card

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A thief thinks everyone steals.

In Danish the proverb is “tyv tror hver mand stjæler”: a thief believes every man steals. It is said of people who assume their own fault is common, often as an excuse for it. The saying also appears in the Norwegian folk tale “Gullfuglen” (The Golden Bird), published by the folklorist Peter Christen Asbjørnsen in 1871: a prince, caught by a troll, answers him with it. Psychologists call the habit of seeing our own faults in others projection.

Danish proverbRead card

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Be water, my friend.

Bruce Lee spoke this line as the martial arts teacher Li Tsung in the American television series Longstreet in 1971, at the end of a short speech about water taking the shape of whatever holds it. Later that year he repeated the idea in a television interview with the Canadian journalist Pierre Berton. The image echoes Taoist writing such as the Tao Te Ching, where water is soft yet wears away what is hard. Lee's own martial art, Jeet Kune Do, rests on the same idea: adapt to the opponent instead of holding to fixed forms.

Bruce LeeRead card

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An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.

Online this is often credited to Lao Tzu, the Chinese sage of the Tao Te Ching, but the book has no such line. It is a Mexican proverb, “Más hace una hormiga andando que un buey echado”, listed in the Mexican Academy of Language's proverb collection as praise for persistent work and a rebuke to idleness. Its English wording appears in Jeff M. Sellers's Folk Wisdom of Mexico (1994). In 2006 a Reader's Digest quotation book printed it as Lao Tzu's, and the mistake spread online.

Lao Tzu (popular attribution; not in the Tao Te Ching)Read card

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You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.

The line is shared as a saying of Carl Jung (1875–1961), the Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology, but no one has found it in his books, lectures or letters. Psychologists call the idea behind it the intention-behaviour gap: in a 2002 review of studies with over 82,000 participants, Paschal Sheeran found that stated intentions explained only about 28 per cent of the differences in what people did. Research by Peter Gollwitzer shows that planning exactly when and where to act helps close the gap.

Carl Jung (popular attribution)Read card

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Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

There is no evidence that Abraham Lincoln, who died in 1865, ever said this. The quotation researcher Garson O'Toole traced it to a 1944 speech by the Reverend W. H. Alexander of Oklahoma City, about a lumberjack who, given five minutes to fell a tree, would spend three sharpening his axe. The earliest known link to Lincoln is a 1960 advertisement for drilling equipment, still counting in minutes; versions in hours came later. The idea is older: an American sermon of 1856, “The Dull Axe”, made the same point.

Anonymous woodsman's proverb; credited to Lincoln from 1960Read card

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I say “try”; if we never try, we shall never succeed.

Lincoln wrote this on 13 October 1862 to General George B. McClellan, commander of the Union's Army of the Potomac in the American Civil War. Nearly a month earlier McClellan had stopped Robert E. Lee's Confederate army at Antietam, the bloodiest single day of the war, but had not pursued it. Lincoln reminded him of his “over-cautiousness” and urged him to follow Lee closely and at least try to reach Richmond, the Confederate capital, first. McClellan still moved slowly, and on 5 November Lincoln removed him from command.

Abraham LincolnRead card

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All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner.

This opens a lecture on Discoveries and Inventions that Abraham Lincoln, then a lawyer in Illinois, first gave in Bloomington in April 1858 and later repeated in other Illinois towns. He goes on to say that the whole earth, people included, is full of “leads”, a miner's word for veins of ore, from which humans were to dig out their destiny. Animals labour too, he says, but man is the only one who improves his workmanship. The lecture praises speech, writing and printing, and ends with the patent system, which “added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius”. Lincoln knew the subject first hand: in 1849 he patented a device for lifting boats over shoals, and he is still the only US president to hold a patent.

Abraham LincolnRead card