- English translation
Some days are sweet as honey, others sharp as onions.
- Literal wording
A day of honey and a day of onions.
- Meaning and lesson
Honey and onions are paired to mark two opposite kinds of days: one on which things go well for a person and one on which they go badly. Fortune is not fixed in place; it shifts, so the same person meets both favorable and unfavorable days.
The focus is the turn itself. Whoever has the upper hand on one day may find matters running against them on another, and the reverse holds equally. The rhyme between the Arabic words for honey and onions is lost in English.
- When it is used
Fitting when circumstances swing between favorable and unfavorable, such as when a success is followed by a setback or a bad stretch by a good one, as a remark that fortune does not stay on one person's side.
Cite or copy proverb
How this record reached us: Editorially sourced.
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