Arabic proverbs

Hired troops won't fire a shot.

The saying argues that people who fight only for wages have no real reason to risk themselves. A mercenary is not guarding his own home or land, so once left to his own judgment he will hang back and may never fire a single shot at all.

The rib'iyya taught her own mother how to graze.

The image shows an offspring, the rib'iyya, instructing its own mother in grazing, a skill the mother would normally pass down. The exact creature meant by the word is uncertain, but the expected order of teaching is clearly turned around, so the one who should be learning becomes the teacher.

Not everyone who blows on the fire cooks a meal, and not everyone who cooks a meal blows on the fire.

Results do not always correspond neatly to the effort or means used to reach them. Someone may obtain an aim with little apparent exertion, while another person’s hard work may not bring the hoped-for result.

Many helping hands bring success.

A task becomes easier to carry through when several people join their efforts. The saying praises practical cooperation, emphasizing that shared labor can turn a difficult undertaking into a manageable one.

Save the wedding cries for when the bride is actually here.

The image is of a wedding: zaghārīṭ, the ululations women raise in festive joy, belong to the moment the bride is actually led in procession, sounding right over her head. Raising them earlier spends the celebration at the wrong time, before its proper occasion has come.

The snake charmer never forgets his son's death, and the snake never forgets losing her tail.

The saying pictures two old enemies: a father whose son was killed by a snake, and the snake itself, which escaped his revenge with only its tail cut off. Each carries a lasting injury from the other, so neither can let the quarrel go, and both stay alert for a chance to strike back.

Were it not for all the chiseling and sawing, even women would have taken up carpentry.

The saying claims that carpentry would be open to anyone, even women, whom its traditional framing assumes would stay out of the trade, were it not for the painstaking work of chiseling and sawing. That assumption belongs to the saying's era and is not endorsed here. A craft's hidden difficulty is what keeps casual newcomers away.

Stumble on a stone once and go back to it, and you've earned whatever comes to you.

The proverb holds that a first misfortune can be excused as bad luck, but repeating the same mistake after being warned by experience is a choice. Whoever ignores a lesson they have already paid for has no grounds to complain about the consequences.

The thing you hold is closer than the thing tucked away in your pocket.

The saying draws attention to degrees of nearness: something already in hand may be more immediate or accessible than another thing that is also one's own but kept elsewhere.

My, don't you look grand in someone else's clothes! Give it a moment and they'll be pulling them off your back.

The saying mocks a person who parades in borrowed clothing, or in anything else that belongs to someone else. Though it opens like praise for how well the item suits them, it is a taunt: the real owner will soon reclaim it, leaving the show-off exposed and empty-handed.

Reach sixty, and you'll ache even when nothing is wrong.

The saying holds that old age is itself a kind of affliction. Once a person passes a certain point in life, aches, weariness, and discomfort arrive on their own, even when no specific disease can be named. Its verb can mean either complaining or feeling pain, so it may point to grumbling or to bodily ache; both share this idea.

He has neither a house of his own nor even a share in a mill.

The expression describes a person who owns nothing at all. The saying names no subject; the person is understood from context. It names two familiar forms of property, a house held outright and a partner's stake in a jointly owned mill, and denies both, so the listener understands that the person has no solid holdings whatsoever.

Everyone gets their moment, and then it passes.

Prominence is pictured here as a rotation: whoever stands highest today is only occupying a spell of standing that will later pass to someone else. The turn is a period of rising fortune, not merely a place in a queue. Status appears borrowed rather than owned, with an endpoint built into every success.

Were a camel ever to see its own hump, it would bite the thing away.

A camel goes through life carrying a crooked lump on its back that sits just outside its own line of sight. If it ever turned and caught a look at that bulge, it would gnaw it off to be rid of the ugly flaw.

A man who refuses to acknowledge his own father is as good as illegitimate.

This is an emphatic moral rebuke for a person who rejects or casts off his father. It treats such conduct as a grave failure of family duty, using a deliberately severe, stigmatizing insult connected with birth outside marriage to underline condemnation.

Tell the donkey he's invited to the wedding, and he'll answer: 'So it's carrying people or hauling rubbish, then.'

The saying portrays someone so used to being overlooked that a pleasant invitation strikes them as a disguised summons to work. The donkey hears about a celebration and knows at once that it faces forced, unpaid labor, either carrying riders or hauling away rubbish, never joining the festivities as an honored guest.

Complaining to anyone but God only brings you shame.

The saying treats laying one's suffering before other human beings as humiliating. It imagines that human listeners cannot offer the same refuge as God and may leave the sufferer feeling diminished or dependent. Its contrast is sweeping: the dignity of appealing to the Creator is placed against the shame of complaining to fellow creatures.

Keep piling it up; God will open the way.

The saying comforts someone whose goods or work seem to be piling up with no outlet. Its verb can picture heaping things up or shaping pounded meat for frying and sale; either image tells them not to fret, because God, the One who brings about the means, arranges how the stock will move.

The only thing wrong with them is that there are so few.

The saying praises money by pretending to criticize it. Its one complaint is that there is never enough. The unstated "them" refers to money, not to any group of people, so the line is not a remark about a community being few or flawed. Money is otherwise wholly desirable, and its only shortcoming is scarcity.

Give me a handout, and treat me as your lord while you're at it.

The saying sketches a beggar who asks for alms, the charitable gift meant by ḥasana here, while insisting on his own superiority. He needs the giver, yet behaves as though the giver should be grateful. The humor comes from the clash between his empty hands and his lofty airs.

Want to look unattractive? Leave your face unwashed.

The proverb treats face-washing as a small act that improves a person’s visible appearance. Its deliberately contrary advice implies that failing to wash makes one’s unattractive features or unkempt look more noticeable.

Tireless as the noonday demon; nothing ever wears him out.

The saying pictures a spirit that roams in the scorching hours of midday, when everyone else is overcome by heat and sinks into rest. Such a creature is never worn down by fatigue or forced to settle, so comparing someone to it marks them as endlessly active and immune to exhaustion.

Talk to a cat and you'll get scratched.

The cat stands for a person whose nature is to harm others; the saying is not about animals. Even ordinary conversation with such a person brings a hostile reaction, like a claw that draws blood rather than a light scratch. The trouble comes not from what you say but from who they are.

Let me be a dog at rest rather than one worn out by tilling the fields.

The saying expresses a willingness to accept being called a dog, a strong insult, if that label comes with ease. In the speaker's bitter view, lying about like a worthless dog beats carrying a crushing burden of heavy toil, with farm tilling standing for hard labor generally.

Nothing given, and not even a kind word.

The saying faults a person who offers nothing of value on either front: no material help or good deed, and not even the small consolation of courteous, pleasant speech. It marks the double failure of someone who could at least have softened a refusal with kind words but chose not to.

You shriveled winter fig!

The expression likens a frail person to sycamore figs that the winter has come upon. Once the cold reaches this fruit, it shrinks and withers, and the person being addressed is pictured the same way: shriveled, diminished, and stripped of vigor.

So the man who can't walk went off on an outing? He's paying for it himself.

The saying answers anyone who finds another person's choice of pleasure surprising or unsuitable. Its humor rests on a bystander assuming that an outing is unexpected for someone unable to walk, an assumption the proverb rebuts rather than endorses. If a person pays their own way, onlookers have no grounds to complain.

Having nothing to wear is what teaches you to spin.

Someone with no clothes to wear has no choice but to learn how to spin yarn and make cloth. Here الغزل means spinning thread, not its other senses of love poetry or flirtation. Hardship becomes the teacher, pushing a person to master a craft they would otherwise never have attempted.

Where could the sun go, if not onto the harvester's neck?

The saying pictures harvest workers bent over in open fields while the sun beats on the nape of their necks (قفا) all day. Here راح marks the future ('will'), not 'went': where will the sun go? The expected answer is 'nowhere'; its glare stays on the reaper while the work lasts.

If you make yourself a camel, do not bellow about the labor.

The proverb rebukes a person who makes himself seem important and then complains about the burden attached to that posture. Its camel image concerns a conspicuous self-presentation, not necessarily actual leadership or social status.

The one who dreads a demon is the one who ends up seeing it.

The saying observes that a person may encounter the very unwelcome matter that has occupied their fears. It links persistent dread of a disliked possibility with subsequently finding oneself faced with it.

Just like smoke: once it slips out, it never returns.

The saying likens a person to smoke drifting out through an opening: once it escapes, it is gone for good. It describes someone whose regular pattern is to slip away from a place or gathering and simply not come back; the smoke image concerns escape without return, not the fleeting nature of life or wealth.

When luck turns its back, no chain is strong enough to hold on to anything.

The unnamed feminine subject is understood as worldly fortune, or life's favor, not a woman. Once it starts to leave, it carries everything off with it. Wealth, standing, or security that seemed firmly bound in place slips away anyway, as if iron links were simply torn apart.

A person who has benefited from another people’s generosity will fight on their side.

Receiving kindness or material benefit from a people creates an expectation that one will stand with them. The saying presents this obligation through the image of taking up arms in their defense when they face opposition.

What you lay out for others to enjoy no longer belongs to you.

The saying measures ownership by who benefits rather than by who pays. When your resources are spread out for someone else to enjoy, the advantage they bring lands with that person, even though the expense was entirely your own.

Give me the camels breaking wind on land over the fish chanting God's praises at sea.

The saying sets an overland journey, with the smells and noises of a camel caravan (al-bill is a rural dialect form of the word for camels), against a sea voyage. The land route's coarse discomforts are worth bearing, because hearing fish praise God, as all creatures are held to do, means being down among them: drowned.

Let it stay in its nest till a hornet comes along and chases it away.

The saying advises against disturbing something that has settled into place. As long as nothing forces a change, the wiser choice is to let the situation run its course until necessity intervenes, rather than stepping in early.

Once the ewe has been slaughtered, skinning her can't cause any pain.

The image is of an animal that is already dead. Whether the butcher handles the carcass carefully or roughly makes no difference, because the creature can no longer feel anything. After the decisive blow, everything that follows causes no further pain.

Whether he acts or not, he remains wretched and disappointed.

The saying describes someone whom others judge unfavorably whatever he does. Meeting expectations brings no credit, while failing to do so merely confirms the criticism already directed at him; it reports hostile social judgment rather than an objective verdict on the person.

You who dig a hidden pit for others will surely fall into it yourself.

The proverb warns that anyone who secretly lays a trap for someone else will end up caught in it. The image is a pit dug and covered over as a disguised trap, not an ordinary well, so the plotter becomes the victim of his own concealed scheme.

He never caught them stealing, so he claims he caught them squaring up the take.

The saying portrays an accuser who has no grounds to say he caught anyone in the act. Unable to make that claim stick, he invents a different sighting: he says he watched them settling accounts among themselves, hinting at stolen proceeds without claiming to have witnessed any theft.

Better to be alone than to travel with a companion who wears you down.

The saying ranks being on one's own above keeping company with someone who brings strain and difficulty. Companionship is valued only when it eases life; a partner who constantly causes trouble turns that value upside down, making isolation the gentler option.

A rubbish collector with a rose in his hand.

The image pairs a man who hauls refuse with a delicate flower in his grip, and the clash is the point. The saying mocks someone who decorates or presents himself in a way that does not fit his real circumstances or line of work, so the ornament only highlights the mismatch.

When plague swept through the camels, the one-eyed man ended up leading the caravan.

The saying describes a person who reaches a leading role only because better candidates are absent. The one-eyed man becomes the lead driver walking at the head of the camel train, not for his merit: disaster has thinned the field until he is all that remains, so his rise shows how scarce good people are, not how talented he is.

If only the ground would crack open and swallow me up.

The speaker calls on the ground itself to crack apart and take them in, so that nobody can see them any longer. The image turns intense embarrassment into a physical wish to disappear from the scene and escape the eyes of everyone present.

When wits were handed out, everyone was happy with his share; when fortunes were handed out, nobody was happy with his.

The saying points to a lopsided habit of human judgment: almost everyone is pleased with their own share of intelligence or good sense, yet almost everyone feels shortchanged in their livelihood, income, or allotted lot in life. Contentment comes easily for the mind and rarely for one's fortune.

Water goes down best from the hand of its own water-bearer.

The image is simple: a drink is best received from the person whose job it is to serve it, the one who hands out drinking water, not someone who irrigates land. From that picture the saying draws a general rule. Every task has someone who handles it properly, and things go well when that person is the one doing it.

What's left of my life isn't worth repenting for.

The speaker argues that so little of life remains that repentance, or tawba, would hardly pay off. With no time left for good deeds to balance past wrongs, they ask to be left alone with their present ways. It is a self-excusing remark, not a sincere theological claim.

A man is like gold jewelry: it may break, but it can be made whole again.

A man who has lost his money is compared to a piece of worked gold or silver jewelry that has been damaged. The breaking stands for falling into poverty, not physical injury or moral failure. Just as a smith can restore such an ornament, a husband's present poverty can be followed by renewed prosperity.

Whatever suits the case is what gets done.

The saying expresses a principle of fitting action to circumstance. Rather than applying one fixed approach everywhere, one weighs what each situation requires and does whatever is appropriate to it. Its passive verb leaves the doer unnamed, so it can read as a statement of practice or as advice.