“Governing a large country is like frying a small fish.”
Laozi book Tao Te Ching
Source: Tao Te Ching, Ch. 60
:3 Fish: Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.
:1 Fish. Why, as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones.
:*William Shakespeare, Pericles, Act ii. Sc. 1.
Source: Discourses Concerning Government (1689), Ch. 2, Sect. 18; comparable to:
“Governing a large country is like frying a small fish.”
Laozi book Tao Te Ching
Source: Tao Te Ching, Ch. 60
“Being a big fish in a small pond is great until you have to poop.”
Ron English (1959) American artist
Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)
“Some men fish all their lives without knowing it is not really the fish they are after.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist
“It's no fish ye're buying, it's men's lives.”
Walter Scott book The Antiquary
Volume I, Ch. 11.
The Antiquary (1816)
Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher
Source: Images and Symbols (1952), p. 90 - 91.
“Madness, like small fish, runs in hosts, in vast numbers of instances.”
Philip K. Dick The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Page 236
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)
“Sin which men account small brings God's great wrath on men.”
Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan
Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices, 1652
“Great men are sometimes so even in small things.”
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 188.
John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman
Speech at his Durham election (July 1843), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 100.
1840s