The Ant and the Grasshopper, also known as The Grasshopper and the Ant (or Ants), is one of Aesop's Fables, providing an ambivalent moral lesson about the virtues of hard work and planning for the future. In the Perry Index it is number 373. The fable has been adapted or reinterpreted in a number of works from the 19th century to the present.
Read more about The Ant And The Grasshopper: The Fable and Its Negative Version, The Fable in Art, Later Adaptations, Musical Settings, Film and Television Treatments, The Moral Debate
Famous quotes containing the words ant and/or grasshopper:
“Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.”
—Bible: Hebrew Proverbs, 6:6.
The words were rendered by Samuel Johnson in the opening lines of The Ant: “Turn on the prudent ant thy heedful eyes, Observe her labours, sluggard, and be wise.”
“A worm is as good a traveler as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)