Arabic proverbs

Dying wasn't enough for the poor man; the grave had to crush him too.

The saying describes a misfortune that arrives on top of an existing one. Its opening is not a denial that death is a burden but an 'as if that were not enough' setup: the dead man already bears death, and the grave still presses in on him, echoing the belief that the grave squeezes the newly buried.

The freeloader's own hand told him: whatever you mean to give away, eat it yourself.

A person who survives on what others give him has no business playing the benefactor. Whatever he is tempted to distribute would serve him better if he consumed it himself, since his own needs remain unmet. The saying pictures his very hand speaking up to stop the show of charity.

A watermelon only grows to full size in its own home.

The proverb says that a child is most likely to develop well with sustained, attentive care from their own family. Its image compares upbringing to a watermelon that reaches maturity only where it was planted.

Bread shared with the needy turns misfortune away.

The saying holds that small acts of generosity, above all giving food to the hungry, serve as a kind of protection. Each mouthful handed to someone in need is pictured as a barrier between the giver and trouble; the morsels point first to feeding the poor and, by extension, to kindness of other kinds.

Better a birth every day than a year's miscarriage.

This saying ranks a pregnancy carried to term and delivered normally as easier and safer for a woman than a miscarriage. Setting ordinary births 'every day' beside a single loss makes the comparison stark: the full-term delivery remains the lighter ordeal.

Even a bland, inferior melon can be full of seeds.

The proverb presents an object judged poor in quality whose abundance supplies no compensating value. Its many seeds are not treated as a virtue, but as part of what makes the whole seem unappealing.

He lies soaking in the water, yet he's scared of getting rained on.

The proverb mocks a person who is already deep inside a serious problem yet anxiously guards against some minor inconvenience. Its images are figurative, not weather advice: lying in water while fearing a few raindrops exposes how absurd it is to guard against a trifle when the larger harm has already arrived.

David, who is there for you to recite your psalms to?

This saying is used when someone is offering sound counsel or useful explanation to people who neither listen nor respond. David’s psalms stand for a valuable message, while the question stresses that no receptive audience is present.

To a husband, a wise wife and a foolish one cost the same to keep.

The saying claims that from a husband's practical standpoint, a sensible wife and a foolish one come to the same thing, because each eats and must be provided for. Its frame is a gendered household where he supplies her upkeep, meaning food and maintenance costs, not affection, and she is reduced to an expense.

He left the saint's festival without so much as a handful of chickpeas.

The image is a mulid, a popular festival with decorations and crowds held in honor of a saint, not only the Prophet, and not always on the actual birth date. A famous one honors al-Sayyid al-Badawi at Tanta. Vendors sell roasted chickpeas, a cheap, humble treat. Someone who leaves without any has gained nothing at all.

I may side with my brother against my cousin, but I will side with my cousin against an outsider.

The saying sets out a hierarchy of kinship loyalties. In a dispute between brother and cousin, the brother receives support; when the cousin faces a stranger, the wider family tie becomes the stronger allegiance.

Someone says the camel went up the palm tree. The answer comes back: "Fine. There's the camel, and there's the palm."

A claim that cannot possibly be true collapses once someone puts it to a practical test. The tale stages this: one voice reports that a camel scaled a palm tree, and another briskly points to the animal and the tree, challenging the claimant to repeat the feat on the spot.

Let the newly rich cook a single meal, and he'll be up all night making a racket over it.

The saying ridicules someone who has only lately come into comfort and cannot carry it calmly. One cooked meal, unremarkable to anyone used to plenty, sets him clamoring through the night, both trumpeting the food and railing against his lot. The racket, whether pride or grievance, betrays how unfamiliar even modest abundance still is to him.

Clean or crooked, it all went down the same throat.

The saying portrays a person for whom the moral origin of a gain makes no difference. Halal or haram, the religious categories of permitted and forbidden, the result is the same to them: they consume it. Eating stands for profiting, and the line's moral force rests on that religious framing.

Had we stooped to collecting every scrap lying around, our mattress would be stuffed full by now.

The speaker insists that prosperity was always within reach. Anyone willing to pick up every stray fragment from here and there would amass a great deal. The full mattress is figurative, standing for accumulated wealth or plenty rather than literal bedding.

For a negligent worker, the river does the sifting.

The saying criticizes a person who evades the proper effort a task requires, letting a convenient resource replace careful work. In its image, “the sea” refers to the Nile, whose water is used to clean grain instead of sifting it.

If love went by choice, I'd have fallen for the sultan's daughter.

Love is not something a person selects by wish or personal preference. The speaker reasons that if affection obeyed inclination, everyone would aim at the grandest prize, the sultan's daughter, a stock figure for the most desirable and unreachable match rather than any real royal. Since hearts attach where they please, actual attachment may be modest, inconvenient or surprising.

Your neighbor stays your neighbor, even when he does you wrong.

Wrongdoing does not strip a neighbor of his place. The person living beside you who treats you unjustly still holds, despite that injustice, the standing and regard that living next door carries with it.

We hunger for it, yet we make a face and call it disgusting.

The saying captures a familiar kind of hypocrisy: someone longs for a thing in private while loudly expressing distaste for it in front of others. Having one's 'eye' on it means craving it, not merely looking, and the closing word is an exclamation of disgust, not the word for 'brother'.

You won't be kind yourself, and you won't let God's kindness reach us either.

The saying targets a person who is unhelpful twice over. They offer no compassion or support themselves, and they also get in the way of any relief that might come from elsewhere, here pictured as the mercy of our Lord coming down upon us.

Better to make peace and lose a little than to go to court and win.

The proverb argues that ending a dispute by agreement is worth more than winning it through a lawsuit, even if the agreement costs you something. Victory in court brings gain on paper, but the process itself demands worry, attention, and prolonged strain.

Whoever is away gets no share, and whoever dozes off with his face covered might as well be gone.

Whoever is not present when something is handed out forfeits any claim to it. Here نايب means a portion or share from a division, not a deputy. The saying treats absence as giving up one's portion, and the Arabic pairs غايب with the rhyming نايب to make the point.

God has made us equal in one thing only: death.

While alive, people differ widely in fortune, ability, standing, and power, and those gaps can seem permanent and deeply unfair. The saying attributes the leveling to God, observing that nothing in ordinary life erases these distinctions; only death finally places everyone on the same footing.

When something truly valuable turns up at the market, pay what it is worth; a cheap purchase brings no profit.

A sensible buyer judges goods by their worth and demand rather than by the price tag alone. When a sought-after, high-quality article appears, it is better to pay its full price than to hold back and choose something inferior simply because it costs less.

Having something beats having nothing.

The saying holds that even a small or imperfect gain deserves to be valued, because possessing a little always beats having nothing at all. It urges people to accept a modest portion instead of rejecting it for falling short of what they hoped for.

He releases the one who did the slaughtering and arrests the one who only did the skinning.

The saying pictures an animal being butchered. Whoever cuts its throat commits the decisive act, while whoever strips the hide afterward plays a secondary part. Freeing the first and seizing the second marks a judgment that has its priorities reversed, letting the real offender walk away.

Bear one child, then a second, and she has become a worn-out old woman.

The proverb dramatizes the physical cost of motherhood. After bearing a child and then a second one, a woman is pictured as having turned into a decrepit old woman, as if two rounds of pregnancy and delivery were enough to consume her youth and strength entirely.

When someone is set on making a fool of himself, let him continue.

The saying advises against exhausting yourself by resisting someone firmly attached to a foolish or mistaken course. When that person’s conduct does not affect you, opposition may accomplish nothing and may not be worth the effort.

Even when resources seem plentiful, manage them wisely.

The saying advises restraint in spending and consumption. Apparent abundance is not a reason to act wastefully; good judgment requires measuring one’s use of what is available.

Mice dig the holes, but it's the bulls that tumble in.

The saying sets small creatures against large ones. Tiny mice burrow holes that cost them nothing, but heavy bulls are the ones who stumble into those holes and get hurt. Trouble started by the weak or insignificant can end up catching the strong and important.

The poem starts with sacrilege.

The saying applies when a shocking or reprehensible matter displays its most objectionable feature at the very beginning. Rather than emerging gradually, the gravest offense is immediately visible and shapes the first impression.

Sickness falls on you like a mountain, but health creeps back through the eye of a needle.

The saying contrasts how illness and recovery move. Sickness, not mere tiredness, is pictured as a mountain, a vast weight that drops onto a person suddenly and flattens them. Health, by contrast, must squeeze its way back in through an opening as tiny as a needle's eye, and so it returns only in small amounts.

A man with nothing to his name can beat even the sultan.

Someone who has lost everything is beyond the reach of any claim, however strong. A creditor cannot take money that does not exist, so even the highest authority in the land walks away with nothing when the person who owes is penniless.

Even a master of his craft is still learning on the day he dies.

Mastery is never complete. Here the 'teacher' (mi'allim) is the master of a trade, a skilled senior practitioner rather than a schoolteacher, and the idea extends to scholars too. However skilled or learned such a person becomes, learning ends only with life.

You do someone a kindness, and harm is what comes back to you.

The saying names the painful experience of treating someone well and being repaid with harm or ingratitude. Placing the kind act beside its hurtful result, it highlights how unjust and unexpected that reversal feels to the giver.

Once the patient is cured, he forgets what his healer did for him.

The saying observes that people value a helper most while they still need help. Once the sick person gets better, the memory of the good turn done for them fades, and whoever nursed or treated them, not necessarily a doctor, is overlooked or even forgotten entirely.

Lowborn offspring of unknown stock have had luck carry them up.

The proverb targets people whose parents are thought base and whose origins no one can name, noting with contempt that they have nonetheless come up in the world. Their low or unknown stock is the point of the jab, and its scorn for birth and lineage can give offence.

Sir, may a deadly blood disease seize you! Stop picking at everyone else and fix yourself first.

The speaker curses a habitual critic, wishing a fatal blood disease on him, then tells him to turn his scrutiny inward. The target is someone who busies himself judging other people while his own conduct is no cleaner, and often worse, than theirs.

"A happy night to you, my guest!" Then the host added: "Happy for you and your kids, that is."

A host wishes his guest a happy night and then adds his own comment: the night will be happy for the guest and the guest's children, because they are about to eat most of his supper. Both lines are the host's; the second is a dry grumble, not a sincere blessing.

Like donkeys hauling grapes: they bear the load but never get a bite.

The saying describes a person who is put to work on something valuable yet receives none of its benefit. Like a donkey loaded with grapes, which are not its food, such a person bears the effort while the reward passes to others.

Go on and cook your meal as usual; I'm only one more mouthful among the lot of you.

The saying holds that one individual weighs almost nothing on the resources of a group. Whatever the many prepare for themselves, pictured here as a dish flavored with onions fried beforehand, will stretch to cover one more person without anyone noticing a difference in quantity.

Save from today's meal for tonight, and no enemy will have the pleasure of mocking your need.

The saying praises careful management of resources. Contrasting an earlier meal with a later one, not fixed hours, it says a person who sets aside part of what they have now, instead of consuming everything at once, keeps a reserve and can meet their own needs without asking others for help.

Once he had eaten his fill and leaned back, he complained that the food smelled of mastic.

The saying mocks someone who enjoys a thing until their need is satisfied, then begins to find faults in it. Their criticism comes only after they have already taken the benefit they wanted.

If you don't care about it, leave it in your stepfather's hands.

When a matter means nothing to you, you may as well hand it to someone who cares little about your interests. Your mother's husband, here a stepfather, is traditionally assumed to lack devotion to his wife's children; the saying uses that stereotype without proving it true.

Drop what you are doing and hear this instead.

This saying calls for immediate attention when something unexpected or striking interrupts the matter already at hand. It presents the new event as important enough to make people pause their current activity.

The person who watches over their crop gets to enjoy its harvest.

The saying stresses that benefits remain with the person who protects and tends what is theirs. Neglect leaves one vulnerable to losing the very thing from which one hoped to profit.

Dress up a brick all you like; you'll only get a shabby old crone.

The saying argues that dressing something up cannot change what it fundamentally is. However much finery you put on a plain or crude object, the result stays unappealing, and no amount of covering makes it any better or more useful.

Bring a lying suit, and the judge's purse comes open.

The picture is of a judge whose money pouch opens to receive payment when a knowingly false claim is laid before him. A case with no truth behind it cannot stand on its own, so the saying ties it to payments meant to sway the verdict. Deliberately dishonest litigation is thus shown as something that gives rise to bribery.

The face has been on pilgrimage, but the nature stayed the same.

The saying separates outward bearing from inner character; the colloquial word for "face" stands for a person's whole look. Someone may return from the pilgrimage to Mecca looking devout and reformed, yet the disposition underneath, especially a tendency to harm others, stays as it was. Religious observance or shown repentance alone is not proof of genuine change.

The dog that barks is not the one that bites.

Someone who is constantly loud, rude, and abusive with words is usually not dangerous in practice. The noise itself is taken as a sign of weakness: the person spends their aggression on talk because they lack the courage to follow through with real harm.