This proverbial saying suggests that the ability to work is of greater benefit than a one-off handout.

This proverb has fallen foul of the spurious etymological rule: ‘if you don’t know the origin of an enigmatic proverb, say it is ancient Chinese’. May you live in interesting times and a picture is worth a thousand words suffer the same fate. There’s no evidence to link ‘Give a man a fish…’ with China. A further confusion over the origin is that the authoritative and generally trustworthy Oxford Dictionary of Quotations says it is of mid-20th century origin.

The expression actually originated in Britain in the mid 19th century.

Give a man a fishAnne Isabella Ritchie, the daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, (who, if her photograph is any guide, was a studious young woman) wrote a story titled Mrs. Dymond, sometime in the 1880s and it includes this line.

“He certainly doesn’t practise his precepts, but I suppose the patron meant that if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour; if you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn.”