give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime

== English == === Alternative forms === give a man a fish, teach a man to fish (by ellipsis) === Etymology === Apparently coined by Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie in her 1885 novel Mrs. Dymond, although frequently now attributed to Laozi or other Chinese thinkers. === Pronunciation === === Proverb === give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime 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. 1885 August, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Mrs. Dymond, Vol. I, Macmillan’s Magazine, Vol. LXII, No. 310, p. 246: 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. 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: 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. 2004, Otto Tien-pok Xing, Friendly Advice for the Future of China, p. 67: 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." 2025 May 13, Jerusalem Demsas & al., "The Myth of the Poverty Trap", "Good on Paper", The Atlantic: 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. ==== Translations ==== === References === Ralph Keyes (2007), The Quote Verifier, p. 65 Gary Martin (2011), "Give a Man a Fish...", Phrase Finder. Garson O’Toole (2015), "Quote Origin: Give a Man a Fish...", Quote Investigator.