Fruitless Effort

Away for ages, and back with nothing to show for it.

The saying mocks a person whose long delay ends in nothing. Here وجه is a colloquial form of 'came', not the noun 'face'. A lengthy absence raises hopes of real accomplishment, so returning without results feels doubly disappointing: time was lost, and the expected gain never arrived.

No bigger than a speck of dung, yet it tries to fight the current.

The saying ridicules a trivial, insignificant person or thing that insists on resisting a force vastly greater than itself. The image is a tiny scrap of dung tossed in flowing water that still seems to push back against the stream. Its smallness makes the stubborn defiance look absurd rather than brave.

A mere speck of dung, yet it has the nerve to push back against the torrent.

The saying mocks someone of negligible strength who sets themselves against a far mightier force. Its image of a dung pellet caught in rushing water makes the resistance seem futile and ridiculous, so it belittles the challenger rather than admiring any courage they may show.

Who is going to read it, and who is going to listen?

The paired questions are rhetorical, using the everyday spoken sense of reading and hearing rather than a formal literary voice. The speaker is not asking for anyone's identity but declaring that nobody is paying attention. Whatever is written or said will go unread and unheard, so the effort to communicate feels wasted from the start.

The man with no clothes is chasing the one the thieves left with nothing.

The image sets one man with nothing at all chasing another whom robbers have just left bare. Whatever the pursuer hopes to get, there is nothing there to take, so the effort is pointless from the start. The proverb captures expectation aimed at an empty source.

You cannot get anything out of someone who has nothing.

This proverb points to the uselessness of trying to recover money from a person with no means to meet a claim. It presents the attempt as one from which no payment can realistically be expected.

All the effort we put in has come to nothing.

The saying expresses the view that effort already expended has been wasted. It frames the work as having yielded nothing, with the result that the labor is regarded as having gone for nothing.

You who study, scholarship is wasted on those who know nothing of it.

The expression warns a learned person that pouring scholarly talk into an audience with no grounding in the subject accomplishes nothing. Such exchanges drain time and cheapen the knowledge itself, because the listeners cannot engage with it, weigh it, or answer it meaningfully. Its vernacular spelling reflects spoken pronunciation and gives it an everyday, conversational flavor.

However long a dog's coat grows, nobody shears it for wool.

The saying points to something that grows or multiplies without becoming useful. A sheep's fleece is valuable because it can be sheared and spun, but a dog's long coat, however thick, is never sheared or spun, so its length brings no profit to anyone.

However much you teach a dullard, by morning he has forgotten it all.

The saying pictures someone pouring effort into teaching a dim-witted person through the evening, only to find that by daybreak every lesson has evaporated. The labor is real, but nothing sticks, because the learner lacks the capacity to hold on to what is given.

The goat’s earnings end up feeding the donkey.

The saying describes earnings that are consumed by the costs tied to producing them: money comes in, but expenses absorb it before it yields any real benefit.

An egg cannot break a stone.

The saying points to the futility of confronting a much stronger obstacle with means too weak to affect it. It advises recognizing when an attempted remedy, challenge, or effort is unequal to the problem.

Asked what he had caught, the fisherman answered: "Even what was already in the net got away."

The fisherman's understated reply admits more than an empty day: the catch already in his net slipped away too, though the net itself was not lost. The saying pictures an effort that ends worse than it began, where the hoped-for addition never arrives and the existing stock is lost in the attempt.

If it is coming your way, rest—resting is worthwhile; if it is going away, rest—chasing after it is a loss.

The saying pictures an unnamed thing that either moves toward a person or moves away from them. While it is on its way, sitting still does no damage; even rest counts as a kind of profit, because the approach continues whether or not one stirs.

All that packing and unpacking, and for what? You set out riding a camel and came home riding a cat!

The saying mocks a person who throws great energy into a venture meant to lift them higher, only to end up lower than where they began. Its opening cries pretend to marvel at all the loading and unloading while ridiculing its pointlessness. The camel and the cat mark a fall in standing or fortune, not literal travel.

All that leaping about, and hardly anything caught.

The saying paints a picture of a hunter who bounds here and there yet comes home with almost nothing, contrasting a great deal of motion with a meager haul. The energy spent is plain to see, but it yields very little of value.

Well done for nothing, Ashur!

The saying mocks a person for doing something useless. The opening interjection works like a sarcastic cheer: mock praise saying the deed amounted to nothing. A plain rendering such as 'bravo' loses this scorn unless the ironic tone is made clear.

Strike the one-eyed man on his bad eye and he'll just say, 'That one was gone already.'

The saying describes harm aimed at something already beyond saving. The one-eyed man is struck on his blind eye, so the blow takes nothing from him; he notes that the eye was lost long before. Damage done to what is already ruined changes nothing.

After all that fasting, he broke his fast with nothing but an onion.

The image is of a person who endures a long fast, then breaks it (fiṭir, colloquial for 'broke his fast') with a single onion, a meal far too meagre to satisfy hunger. The onion stands for anything cheap and unsatisfying, not for a literal food custom; all that self-denial earns something trivial.

Sift it seven times and the husk still gets through.

The saying pictures someone running flour through sieve after sieve while bran and stray bits of stalk, which sifting should remove, keep slipping back in. All that sifting fails because it is done carelessly, so the flour is no cleaner than before. Repeating a task many times means little if it is never done properly.

After all that piping, the last thing you hear is a toot.

An activity may come to an end without producing anything useful.

Do not keep spending sound resources on an earlier loss when further investment is unlikely to repair it. The saying urges a person to stop compounding damage rather than letting money already lost dictate the next decision.