To ponder
Some time ago I took note of the following offering in a comment thread. It’s a Talmudic saying that goes like this:
The truth is a heavy burden; only a few can carry it.
Yes, indeed.
When I did a search to find its origins I came up with a few more (they were under the heading “Hebrew proverbs”—but unfortunately I can’t seem to find the link right now) that seemed equally impressive, equally appropriate, equally wise, equally sad, and equally previously unknown to me.
Here they are for your contemplation:
The world is in the hands of fools.
Two farmers each claimed to own a certain cow. While one pulled on its head and the other pulled on its tail, the cow was milked by the lawyer.
The thief who has no opportunity to steal thinks he is an honest man.
Buttered bread always falls dry side up.
If someone is coming to kill you, get up early and kill him first.
This one’s a bit more cheery:
Whoever teaches his son teaches not only his son but also his son’s son, and so on to the end of generations.
This one may have guided Freud:
A dream which has not been interpreted is like a letter unread.
This one, however, I’d already heard:
To save one man is like saving a world
Only I know it in a more poetic form:
Whoever saves a single life it is as though he saved the universe.
Two of my favorites from my Polish grandmother: “Old age is not a blessing” and “Death is not a wedding.” (The first one has the advantage of rhyming; I can only render it phonetically– “Starosh na radosh”).
I had a gut reaction to why the butter is down on the toast when it hits the floor. Turns out I was essentially correct.
Backup lookup:
BBC – h2g2 – Why Toast Falls Butter Side Down
Many have taken Sod’s Law as the root causal factor for why toast always falls butter side down. This is incorrect. The real answer lies in simple physics. A falling piece of bread is influenced by several factors. The major one is gravity. The second and often overlooked one is height of the standard kitchen counter. The third factor is the size of the bread. The fourth and final factor1 is the angle at which the bread initially leaves its starting position. Most falling bread falls either to the left or the right. Rarely does a person hold both sides of the bread level with the ground and simultaneously drop it from both hands at the same instant. Instead, one is usually balancing the aforementioned bread slice in one hand and a bread knife in the other.
A Period of Rotation
The angle imparted by the ungainly divestiture of the bread causes the bread to rotate as it falls, fuelled somewhat by the uneven mass distribution of the butter or other viscous substance (ugh! like Marmite) on the bread or toast slice. This rotation has a period and unfortunately the floor intersects this cycle exactly at the half way point, resulting in the deposition of the bread slice with the viscous side down. If the counter top were twice as high, the bread would land butter side up 95% of the time. You can check this with a ladder in your kitchen and drop bread missiles from it. If you haven’t a ladder handy, cut the bread in fourths or use a saltine cracker and drop from normal counter height. You can see that the cracker has a different period of rotation due to its smaller size, and should be able to complete a full rotation before hitting the floor.
*roc scssrs: “joy”, not “blessing”. Closer translation will be “Old age is not a joy”.
Not sure if Poles had adopted it, but it’s a Russian proverb. Either way it is not Jewish.
Neo: ah, if only
a) I knew Yiddish
b) wrote down after my late babbe! She did sometimes translated for us, ignoramuses; not often enough.
My mother occasionally tells me that growing old isn’t easy. I respond with, “Growing old is not for the faint of heart.” I don’t know where I first heard that, but it certainly seems to be true, and would fit in with the words of wisdom given above.
Buttered bread always falls dry side up.
There’s a joke that comes with that one. A lady drops the toast and is stunned when it lands butter side up. Suspecting a message from G*d she consults a Rabbi. Hmm, he sinks into deep thought. Many minutes pass, then he looks up and say, “You buttered the wrong side.”
and the moral of the story?
always know which side your bread is buttered on 🙂
And buttered bread is the one food exempt from the five second rule.
every CULTURE has them, they are the wisdom that need not come up enough to learn by example as in day to day culture. [and usually each has many equivalents]
“Don’t be too sweet lest you be eaten up; don’t be too bitter lest you be spewed out”
“Life is the greatest bargain – we get it for nothing”
A half-truth is a whole lie
“If you ever need a helping hand you’ll find one at the end of your arm”
“Don’t spit into the well – you might drink from it later”
Don’t approach a goat from the front, a horse from the back, or a fool from any side.
If you have nothing to lose, you can try everything
When a thief kisses you, count your teeth
Seek advice but use your own common sense
If God were living on earth, people would break His windows
He who puts up with insult invites injury
The soldiers fight, and the kings are heroes
Surrounding yourself with dwarfs does not make you a giant
If God wants people to suffer, he sends them too much understanding
oy! thats so true, and i am not even jewish.
If rich people could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living
The truth is not always what we want to hear
God created a world full of little worlds
A snake deserves no pity
Hell shared with a sage is better than paradise with a fool
With money in your pocket, you are wise, and you are handsome, and you sing well too
It is not good to be alone, even in Paradise
Too humble is half proud
It’s astonishing how important a man becomes when he dies
If you want to know what God thinks of money, look at the people he gives it to
All signs are misleading
yes, the jewish people sure have a lot of good ones, and the fact that so many were writers and authors of note that we know many of them even if we dont know were they came from
“Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest. How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep? yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep: So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man.” Proverbs 6:6-11
Greetings:
I grew up in the Bronx. My favorite Yiddish expression was “Hands don’t take what eyes don’t see.”
To Ponder, TX, Pop 432:
“Ponder is located on FM 156, between FM 2449 and SH 380. It’s north of Fort Worth, west of Denton, east of Decatur and south of Krum. And if you BLINK, you will miss it!”
Bonnie and Clyde once robbed the Ponder State Bank. When the B&C movie was made, the Hollywood crew came to Ponder to recreate the scene.
Ponder’s hated rivals are the Krum Bobcats. Ponder’s mascot, the Lion, is especially capable of defeating a Bobcat. Go Lions! Beat Krum!
My favorites are, “Don’t stab the dog just because your WoW character died!?” and “blab blab blab .. yeah (long pause) like a hair on a biscuit!”
lol
My favorites?
“A fool does eventually what a wise man does initially.”
“80% of success is just showing up.” (yeah, Woody Allen… He was right though.)
“Treat every gun as though it is loaded. So, you might as well keep it loaded….” (My dad)
“Always shoot the messenger–he should have been working to fix the problem instead of telling you about the problem.” (Me)
“Give a man a match and he will be warm for a while. Set him on fire and he will be warm the rest of his life.” (Anon)
Oh! Oh! My favorites from my ol’ Man. He was a programmer on the huge Mainframes at “A National Nuclear Research Lab” when dinosaurs roamed the Earf :
“You don’t solve problems on a computer, you solve them in your head and then bring them to the computer for confirmation.”
“Processing power should be brutally massive and at arms length.”
“A computer on your desk only helps you make mistakes faster.”
and in tennis, as in life:
“Everything comes naturally after 10,000 repititions.”
“You should spend 10 dollars on a raquet and 1000 dollars on tennis balls if you ever want to play well.”
Well after the insane Climate Control pronouncements at the G8 I would say the world is in charge of KING CANUTES (look up your British History) .
At first glance you would say they are all totally INSANE to claim to be able to control the climate. But look more deeply into this its not THEM who are insane they think WE are insane or so gullible they can spout any nonsense at us and we will believe it.
So why are they so confidently able to make such a STUPID statement that they are going to bring down the worlds temperature by 2 deg C. Think about it the world has ALREADY been cooling for the past 10 YEARS 0.7 deg F at the last count . They KNOW the Green NAZI CO2 LIE has been busted and the climate is controlled by the Sun not mans emissions so they can make this prediction fairly safely. Of course the DUMB DUMB DUMB MSM and the Green NAZI moonbats and stupid celebrity worshiping general populace will swallow this hook line and sinker. Just wait for the sudden DISCOVERY that the earth is cooling and the credit for it being given to Obambi . I used to think that all this talk of a World controlling cartel was just another conspiracy theory but this adds some truth to that story.
The truth is a heavy burden; only a few can carry it.
The version of this I’ve always heard – and suspect is closer to the truth – is:
The truth is heavy, therefore few care to carry it.
I’ve always loved proverbs in general. Many, many years ago B&N offered one of their little stocking-stuffer gift books that was nothing but proverbs. I didn’t buy it and have regretted it ever since.
I sometimes wonder if appreciating proverbs is the sign of an inherently conservative nature: to me they represent the accumulated wisdom of generations who’ve learned things the hard way and therefore provide a road map for anyone willing to have a little faith in ancestral wisdom.
Of course, even with a solid base of proverbs to guide us we still need to exercise judgment in determining which ones apply to a situation. For example, I assume that if a Democrat were to justify Waxman-Markey with a proverb, he’d probably come up with “A stitch in time saves nine”. I’d counter with “Haste makes waste”.
Perhaps you’ve heard the Turkish proverb?
If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.
Gun-related wisdom I got from my Pap:
Never point a gun at anything unless you intend to shoot it. Never, ever point a gun at a person unless you intend to kill them.
I’ve always suspected that the number of gun related deaths would go down if that thought where impressed upon people.
“It don’t mean shit… It’s all in the marinade and spices bitches!!!”— Johnny Worthington
(Via Vanderleun.)
I like: “Buen abogado, mal vecino.” Good lawyers make bad neighbors.
“Con la mano dando y la boca adorando.” Hammer with the hand and pray with the mouth, or you have to work as well as pray.
And “The devil knows what he knows because he’s old, not because he’s the devil!”
The truth is a heavy burden; only a few can carry it.
Boy don’t I know it, whew.
“Thinking is hard which is why so few people try it.”
“If you take care of your nickels and dimes, your dollars will take care of themselves.”
“It’s amazing what can be accomplished when no one worries about who will get credit.”
“A govt big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you’ve got.”
“Most people can handle adversity. If you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
Whoever saves a single life it is as though he saved the universe.
That line of Jewish wisdom was incorporated into Qu’ran verse 5:32. It is frequently quoted by apologists for Islam, including Obama in his much ballyhooed Cairo speech:
The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.
Typically the Qur’an turns that sentiment on its head in the very next verse where it explains how necessary it is to execute, crucify, and maim those who oppose Allah and Muhammad.
See article Obama quotes verse 5:32, omits 5:33
The original version of the “world in the hands of fools” line is the Talmudic saying: since the Temple was destroyed, prophecy is given only to children and fools.
A few more good ones – Jewish and Gentile:
If you judge by beards and bellies, my goat should be the village Rabbi.
Don’t throw a stone in a well you drank from (this is the original Talmudic version – more about gratitude than practicality).
If a good deed comes to hand – don’t let it go stale.
Say little and do much – the oriental version of this is:
Talk does not cook rice.
Before you marry, keep your eyes wide open. After you marry – close one eye (Nigerian, I believe).
Greetings:
“When the going gets tough, the tough get going, and the smart are already gone.”
Don’t throw a stone in a well you drank from
the version i know is dont sh t where you eat…
“We have the best Congress money can buy.”
-Maybe Mark Twain?
“Teach a man to fish and you lose a Democrat voter.”