Self-reliance

Do your part, and trust God for the blessing.

Encourages practical action while attributing blessing or a favorable outcome to God; it does not guarantee success.

I would rather handle my own affairs than lower myself by begging someone else for help.

The saying rejects help obtained only by speaking or behaving in a servile, self-abasing manner. The speaker chooses personal exertion, however burdensome, rather than submit to another person in order to secure a favor.

Whoever plants need not be afraid of the sparrow.

Someone able to carry out a task should not abandon it merely because of an obstacle they can also handle. The saying presents determination as practical confidence: a foreseeable problem, like the sparrow in its image, need not stop the undertaking.

The person who made the mess should be the one to sort it out.

Responsibility for repairing a problem falls first on the person who created it. The saying stresses that the maker of an entanglement usually understands its details better than anyone else.

A person without help must attend to their own needs.

The saying observes that, when no helper is available, a person must take on the work personally. It presents self-reliance as a practical necessity rather than a grand moral achievement.

Whoever chews with his own teeth gains the benefit.

The proverb praises taking personal responsibility for what concerns one’s own welfare. A person gains most directly by doing the necessary work for himself rather than leaving that essential task to someone else.

If you and I are both too grand for it, who's going to drive the donkeys?

The saying points to the paralysis that follows when two people each insist on their own standing and neither will undertake an ordinary necessary task. Their shared self-importance leaves the work without anyone to carry it out.

One household's abundance cannot supply another household's needs.

The image contrasts two dwellings: one stocked, the other bare. However much the first contains, its store does not pass to the second. Its provisions serve that household’s own needs, so the existence of plenty elsewhere does not itself relieve an empty home.

I would rather go hungry than eat food that comes with reproach.

The saying praises self-reliance and contentment. It presents even an extremely meagre meal as preferable to accepting food or support that a giver later uses to humiliate the recipient or as leverage.

Be a dog for the night, and a lion by morning.

This traditional saying urges a person to accept even difficult or socially humble work if it leads to independence. It presents temporary hardship in earning a living as preferable to relying on others for basic needs.

Prepare your food with the utensils you have yourself.

The saying advises self-reliance in ordinary practical matters. Its image is of preparing beans in one’s own earthen vessel: having one’s own basic tools and provisions reduces dependence on others and the obligations that can accompany borrowing.

Knock on the door, and you will get an answer.

The saying holds that results come only to those who take the first step. A person who stands silently outside a closed door learns nothing, while one who knocks is sure to get some reply. Effort and initiative are presented as the necessary condition for any outcome.

In the end, only what is truly yours will serve you.

The saying claims that dependable benefit comes only from one's own holdings. The calf born to your own cow is a figurative picture of personal property in general: what is yours can be drawn on, while anything held by someone else, or merely promised, cannot be counted on in the same way.

See to your own affairs, and you may have more to show for it.

The proverb urges a person to take a direct hand in matters that affect them. Personal attention is presented as a way to improve the outcome rather than leaving everything to others.

A person can forfeit possessions or a rightful claim by failing to ask for them, assert them, or pursue their return. Here, “goods” means property broadly, not merely merchandise; inaction may be as costly as an overt mistake when what is due is left unclaimed.

Each person, household, or undertaking should carry its own obligations and expenses rather than expecting others to provide continual support.

When a needed person, resource, or opportunity will not come closer or cooperate, the sensible response is to change one’s own plan. The saying favors practical adjustment and initiative over waiting for circumstances to comply.

The saying judges a person or thing as inadequate if it cannot support itself or repay the resources needed to keep it going. A horse unable to carry its own feed represents an unproductive burden.

The saying presents human effort as the means through which divine goodness is received. Food, safety, success, or other benefits may be understood as gifts from God, yet they arrive through the work people do with their own hands.

The person with ultimate responsibility is presumed to notice more, and to judge more effectively, than several people carrying out delegated tasks. Close oversight by the owner or leader is therefore presented as especially valuable, though not as a reliable rule that one leader always knows more than a team.