give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime
Language: English
Part of speech: proverb
Forms: form: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day
form: teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime
form: give a man a fish
form: teach a man to fish
Etymology: Apparently coined by Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie in her 1885 novel Mrs. Dymond, although frequently now attributed to Laozi or other Chinese thinkers.
Senses: examples: text: He certainly doesn't practice his precepts, but I suppose the Patron meant that if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn. But these very elementary principles are apt to clash with the leisure of the cultivated classes.
ref: 1885 August, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Mrs. Dymond, Vol. I, Macmillan’s Magazine, Vol. LXII, No. 310, p. 246
text: It is an oft-quoted saying, and one full of social wisdom, "Give a man a fish, and he will be hungry again to-morrow; teach him to catch a fish, and he will be richer all his life."
ref: 1911, Alice Loane, The Common Growth, page 138:
text: It seems to me that the various HUD programs could be characterized as basic programs. It seems to me the real cure for the rural poor is job creation. I believe that people want to work. I do not believe the myth that people are inherently lazy. The old Chinese proverb, I believe, is a good one. "You can give a man a fish, and he will feed himself a day, and you teach him to fish and he will feed himself for a lifetime."
ref: 1972 March 22, Wes Uhlman, “Extensions and Revisions to the Public Works and Economic Development Act of 1965 as Amended”, in U.S. Congress House Committee on Public Works Hearings 1972, volume 2, page 590:
text: For many years teachers in the Marshall Islands have sought to implement the wise insight of Marcus Aurelius: "Give a man a fish and you have fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you have fed him for ever." Some of our teachers have even convinced themselves that this is Marshallese folk wisdom! But at least they recognize that the most effective help is self-help.
ref: 1992 October, Thomas D. Kijiner, Statement, Provisional Verbatim Record of the 11th Meeting of the 47th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, A/47/PV.11, p. 111
text: Western institutions are fundamentally based on Greco-Roman institutions. If you understand the classics, you understand the framework of every western nation and culture... As the American saying goes, "If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day, but if you teach a man how to fish, he will eat for life."
ref: 2004, Otto Tien-pok Xing, Friendly Advice for the Future of China, p. 67
text: Maimonides defined the highest level of giving as helping a man achieve a livelihood or profession. This has come down to us in modern parlance in its Chinese form as, "If you give a man fish, he will eat for a day; if you teach him to fish, he will eat for a lifetime." Maimonides took the Jewish negative injunction "to save a life" and made it positive—"to help a man achieve a livelihood."
ref: 2010, James E. Hughes Jr., Family: The Compact among Generations, page 73:
text: Paul Niehaus: And we, up until now, have been doing a lot of stuff that's really based on old thinking, right? This sort of good-on-paper-type reasoning, "Teach a man to fish" type thinking... So I would say—and I sort of said this earlier, but—I think that idea of teaching a man to fish is something that when I first heard it made a lot of sense and seemed good on paper. But, like, as we started to test impact over the last 20 years and say, like, What impact do our fishing lessons actually have? I don't think it works very well; the data don't support it.
Demsas: We're bad at teaching people how to fish.
Niehaus: ... The other thing that I think is really interesting—I'll just riff on this a little bit about teaching a man to fish—is the origins of it. So today you hear it, and the way we interpret it is it's saying, like, Don't just give people money, because they're not going to use it in ways that have a lasting benefit. It's important to kind of help them in these other ways, which I think is just empirically untrue.
ref: 2025 May 13, Jerusalem Demsas & al., "The Myth of the Poverty Trap", "Good on Paper", The Atlantic
glosses: It is better to teach someone to do something themself than to provide the action's reward; education or training is more helpful than charity.
wikipedia: Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
Laozi