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勤 The Wealth and Work pond
Chinese proverbs about money and work tie fortune to effort and to honesty. Diligence is rewarded by heaven (天道酬勤), the harvest matches the labor (一分耕耘一分收获), small savings become plenty (积少成多), and wealth taken by crooked means leaves the same way. You are told to work, to save, and to earn it the proper way. In Chinese, people look this up as 天道酬勤.
Chinese thought has never been squeamish about money. Wealth is welcomed, wished for out loud, and pasted on the front door at New Year. What it insists on is the manner of getting it. The governing idea is that riches are fine when they are won rightly, and worthless or dangerous when they are not. In the Analects, Confucius says that wealth and rank are what everyone wants, but if they cannot be had in keeping with the Way, a person of character will not hold onto them. That line hardened over the centuries into the maxim every Chinese schoolchild knows, 君子愛財，取之有道, the noble person loves wealth but takes it by the proper path. Behind it sits the oldest tension in the tradition, between 義 (yì), righteousness, and 利 (lì), profit. You are allowed to pursue gain. You are not allowed to let it outrank your integrity.
The Great Learning makes the warning concrete and a little chilling. Virtue is the root, it says, and wealth is only the branch, and then it delivers the line that sits at the center of this pond: 貨悖而入者，亦悖而出, goods that come in by wrong means go out by wrong means. Money remembers how it was earned. What arrives through a crooked door has already learned the way out, and it tends to leave on the night you stop watching it, taking some of your peace along as fare. This is not superstition so much as a moral accounting. Dishonest wealth carries the seed of its own loss.
If honesty is one pillar, labor is the other, and the Chinese work ethic rests on two prized virtues, 勤 (qín), diligence, and 儉 (jiǎn), frugality. The most compressed statement of the first is 天道酬勤, the way of heaven rewards the diligent, whose spirit descends from the Book of Changes and its image of a tireless sky: heaven moves with vigor, and the noble person likewise never ceases to strengthen himself. You will not always see who is keeping score, but the tradition promises that effort is recorded in an ink you cannot yet read. The farmer's version is blunter and fairer, 一分耕耘，一分收穫, one measure of plowing, one measure of harvest. The field keeps honest books. It pays you for the mornings you knelt in the dirt, not the ones you meant to. And against all of this stands the tradition's favorite warning about idle luck, the Legalist fable 守株待兔, the farmer who saw one hare break its neck on a tree stump and spent the rest of his days waiting by the stump for another. Luck that came once will not return to the same still hand.
There is a softer counter-voice worth hearing. Daoism reframes the whole question with 知足者富, the one who knows contentment is already rich, and its everyday form 知足常樂, contentment is a lasting happiness. Wealth, in that reading, is a state of the heart before it is a sum in a ledger. For the zodiac reader, the patient Ox carries the grain-by-grain thrift of 積少成多, and the resourceful Rat carries the merchant's eye that turns one small stake, placed exactly right, into ten thousand. A life of meaning here is not the largest fortune. It is the fortune you can look at squarely.
Money remembers how it was earned, and wealth that came through a crooked door already knows the way out.
The words the tradition leans on here, in hanzi with their sound.
Each with its sound, its literal sense, its meaning, a reading, and its classical source. Press the speaker to hear any line in Mandarin, or share the one that lands.
14 proverbs
一本萬利
one capital, ten-thousand profit
A tiny investment yields an enormous return.
You keep waiting for the grand stake, the sum that changes everything at once. But the fortunes that hold were rarely the largest ones laid down. They were the smallest ones placed exactly right, then left alone to swell in the dark.
Source Qing dynasty novel 市聲 (Shì Shēng) by 姬文, ch. 26; common merchant idiom
鐵杵磨針
grind an iron pestle into a needle
Sustained diligence achieves what looks impossible.
You looked at the size of what you are trying to become and called it impossible, and from where you stand today you are right. But impossibility is a statement about a single afternoon, not about ten thousand of them. Pick up the stone.
Source 方輿勝覽 (Li Bai legend)
一分耕耘，一分收穫
one measure of tilling, one measure of harvest
The reward you reap is exactly proportional to the effort you sow.
The field keeps honest accounts. It will not pay you for the mornings you meant to work, only for the ones you knelt in the dirt. What you gather in autumn is simply spring, returned to you with interest and no lies.
Source Common Chinese proverb; recorded in the Taiwan MOE 教育部 idiom dictionary
勤能補拙
diligence can mend clumsiness
Hard work compensates for a lack of natural talent.
You were not the quickest in the room; you have known that a long time. But quickness spends itself early, and the one who keeps returning to the work, clumsy and unhurried, ends up holding what the gifted let slip. Effort is the talent no one is born without.
Source Associated with Bai Juyi 白居易 (Tang); popularized via 邵雍 and later usage; classical idiom, exact locus debated
積少成多
accumulate few, become many
Many small things gathered steadily become much; abundance is built grain by grain.
No one gathers a harvest in a day. Abundance is patient arithmetic, a little added and a little kept, until the small becomes a weight you can lean on.
Source Book of Han 漢書
鍥而不捨
to carve and not let go
To keep chiseling without ever giving up, until even stone yields.
Set the blade down and rotten wood defeats you. Keep carving and metal and stone give way. The difference was never the hardness of the material. It was whether your hand came back to it the next day, and the next.
Source Xunzi 荀子, 勸學 (Exhortation to Learning): 鍥而不舍，金石可鏤; Warring States period
開源節流
open the source, restrain the flow
Widen your streams of income while curbing what drains away.
Two hands, always. One opens the spring wider; the other quietly narrows the leak you have been pretending not to see. You cannot fill a vessel you refuse to mend.
Source Xunzi 荀子, 富國 (Enriching the State), Warring States period
事在人為
the matter lies in what a person does
Whether a thing succeeds depends on human effort, not on fate.
You keep asking whether it is meant to be, as if the answer were sealed somewhere out of reach. It is not sealed. The thing waits to see what you will do about it. Fate hands you the clay; the shape is your affair.
Source Feng Menglong 馮夢龍, 東周列國志 (Chronicles of the Eastern Zhou States), ch. 69, Ming dynasty
守株待兔
guard the stump, wait for the rabbit
A caution against idle hope where effort is needed; arrange your space to act, not to wait.
Luck that came once will not return to the same still hand. Arrange your life to move toward what you want, not to sit by the stump waiting for it to fall again.
Source Han Feizi 韓非子, Five Vermin
貨悖而入者亦悖而出
goods that come in crookedly also go out crookedly
Wealth gained by wrong means departs by wrong means.
Money remembers how it was earned. What arrives through a crooked door has already learned the way out, and it will leave the same night you stop watching it, taking a little of your peace as fare.
Source The Great Learning 大學 (in the Book of Rites 禮記), ch. 10
天道酬勤
the way of heaven rewards diligence
Heaven repays those who labor without slackening.
You will not always see who is keeping score, and some nights it feels like no one is. But the sky has a long memory for effort. Keep working when the reward is nowhere in sight; the ledger is being kept in an ink you cannot read yet.
Source Song to Ming Neo-Confucian maxim built on the Book of Changes 周易 (乾卦, 天行健); phrase itself is later formulation
業精於勤荒於嬉
mastery is perfected by diligence, laid waste by play
Skill is sharpened through hard work and ruined through idle amusement.
Your craft is a garden with no neutral season. On the days you tend it, it deepens; on the days you drift, it does not merely pause. It goes to weed. There is no standing still in a thing you love; you are always either sharpening it or letting it dull.
Source Han Yu 韓愈, 進學解 (Exhortation on Study), Tang dynasty
書中自有黃金屋
within books there is, of itself, a house of gold
Learning is its own treasury; study opens the door to fortune.
You will not find the gold by shaking the book. It is in the slow reading, the nights the page would not release you. What you learn becomes a room no one can repossess, and later, when you least expect it, you walk in and find it furnished.
Source Emperor Zhenzong of Song 宋真宗, 勵學篇 / 勸學詩 (Encouragement to Study), Song dynasty
財源廣進
may sources of wealth broadly enter
A blessing that wealth may pour in from every direction.
This is the wish pasted by the door in red each new year, and it asks for something specific: not one windfall but many mouths of income, so that if one runs dry the others still run. Abundance is safest when it does not depend on a single source.
Source Traditional auspicious phrase 吉祥話 (spring-festival couplet register); no single classical text; attested folk formula
No proverb in this pond matches that. Clear the search to see them all.
天道酬勤 (tiān dào chóu qín), the way of heaven rewards the diligent, is the best-known. It promises that steady labor is recorded and repaid even when no reward is in sight. Its spirit comes from the Book of Changes and its image of a tireless heaven. The Mandarin phrase 天道酬勤 is itself a very common search.
Yes. 君子愛財，取之有道 (jūnzǐ ài cái, qǔ zhī yǒu dào) says the noble person loves wealth but takes it by the proper path, and the Great Learning adds 貨悖而入者，亦悖而出, wealth gained wrongly leaves wrongly. Together they teach that how you earn money matters as much as how much you earn.
開源節流 (kāi yuán jié liú), open the source and restrain the flow, is the classic. It says to widen your income and curb your waste at the same time, since you cannot fill a vessel you refuse to mend. The farmer's saying 積少成多, small amounts gathered steadily become much, carries the same thrift.
一分耕耘，一分收穫 (yī fēn gēng yún, yī fēn shōu huò) means one measure of plowing brings one measure of harvest. Reward is proportional to effort, with no shortcuts. The field pays you for the work you actually did, not for the work you intended, which is why the proverb is used to praise honest, unglamorous labor.
Every line here lives in the wider Proverb Pond, where all eighty-seven proverbs wait with their sound, their meaning, and a reading of their own. Draw one from the water at random, or walk the whole set in order along the Path of Mastery.
Follow the thread into a neighboring pond, or see the twelve years in the Chinese zodiac. You can also find your Primal Animal and let it lead you to a proverb worth keeping.
Years these proverbs speak to: 鼠 Rat牛 Ox虎 Tiger兔 Rabbit蛇 Snake馬 Horse猴 Monkey雞 Rooster豬 Pig