
“Sell a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will put you out of a job.”
Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)
Attributed to Marx (possibly in jest) in W. C. Privy's Original Bathroom Companion (2003).
Misattributed
“Sell a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will put you out of a job.”
Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)
This quotation has been misattributed to Laozi; its origin is actually unknown (see "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" on Wiktionary). This quotation has also been misattributed to Confucius and Guan Zhong.
Misattributed
Introduction, p. 1
Catching the Big Fish (2006)
Source: Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity
Context: Ideas are like fish.
If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper.
Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're very beautiful.
A parody of the "Give a man a fish..." proverb alluding to the subprime mortgage crisis of the aughts on The Colbert Report (14 May 2008)
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel Tower (1993), Part 2, Chapter 24, “The Graylands” (p. 540).