Beginning work on a collection of political thinkers, I came across a few Medieval names my Post Graduate curriculum has blissfully skipped. After getting the publisher’s go-ahead, I sat down with the list again and was intrigued by one in particular, Maimonides. After some preliminary web search, I found he was a Jewish philosopher from Spain and one of the most revered Torah scholars of his time. I was also surprised to find that he is the craftsman of the very popular proverb,
Give a man fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime
But my meandering didn’t stop at that. Like a good non-resident Bangali, I then began looking for other proverbs featuring fish.
And after around 25 odd minutes of fishing – a thousand apologies, the temptation was just too ‘maach’ (Shucks! last one, promise) – about, here is what I gathered…
“Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream” – Malcolm Muggeridge
“Governing a great nation is cooking a small fish – too much handling will spoil it”- Lao Tzu
“Many men go fishing their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after” – Thoreau
“Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days” – Benjamin Franklin
“Fishermen own the fish they catch but they do not own the ocean” – Etienne Schneider
“No good fish goes anywhere without a porpoise” – Lewis Carroll
And perhaps my personal favourite:
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle
Or right now, maybe this one:
“Telling a teenager the facts of life is like giving a fish a bath” – Arnold H. Glasgow
Crumbs on my Notebook 