Italian

Italian proverbs, at a glance

• Between saying and doing lies the sea

  Tra il dire e il fare c'è di mezzo il mare

  Literally: Between the saying and the doing there is in middle the sea

  Italian · Italy

  Set beside

  • Spanish — the same Romance grammar and the same rhyme, but the obstacle is a stretch of land, not a sea
  • Russian — the gap reframed as the fairy-tale storyteller's pause between the telling and the doing
  • Mandarin — refuses geography entirely; just two paired clauses on the difficulty of the verbs

• Calm is the virtue of the strong

  La calma è la virtù dei forti

  Literally: The calm is the virtue of the strong

  Italian · Italy

  Set beside

  • Latin (Stoic) — Marcus Aurelius and Seneca on the inner citadel: composure as the rationally trained mind's resistance to disturbance
  • Mandarin — *心如止水*, Daoist composure as the windless pond, with no battle of the soul implied at all
  • Arabic — *الحلم سيد الأخلاق*, the same observation reframed as the cardinal virtue of *ḥilm*, restraint of anger, in the Islamic ethical tradition

• The unhurried pace is what preserves both the body and the journey.

  Chi va piano, va sano e va lontano

  Literally: He who goes slowly, goes healthily and goes far.

  Italian · Italy

  Set beside

  • Latin (Augustus) — the same restraint as a paradox: hurry by slowing down. The Italian unpacks the paradox into a peasant's two-mile reasoning.
  • Russian — the same claim with a wider horizon: the further you intend to go, the slower you should travel
  • Aesop — the same claim made by demonstration rather than statement: the slow animal arrives because the fast one stops