Q0166

Zhuangzi

A verified English rendering from the curated archive.

English

When the springs dry up and fish are stranded together on land, they moisten one another with dampness and wet one another with foam — but better to forget one another in the rivers and lakes.
Thinker Zhuangzi
School Daoism
Source Zhuangzi, The Great Ancestral Teacher
Theme Nature
Another quotation More from this thinker

Source context

This English passage is associated with Zhuangzi, The Great Ancestral Teacher, within the tradition of Daoism. The wording below is a verified rendering prepared for careful reading rather than a claim of unique translation authority.

A short reading

Read in the register of nature, the sentence asks the reader to test an assumption rather than to collect a slogan. In Zhuangzi's wider work, similar claims are usually offered as prompts for judgment: what would have to be true for the sentence to hold, and what would follow if it did?

How to cite this quotation

APA: Zhuangzi. (n.d.). When the springs dry up and fish are stranded together on land, they moisten one another with dampness and wet one another with foam — but better to forget one another in the rivers and lakes. In Philosophy Blind Box. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0166

MLA: Zhuangzi. “When the springs dry up and fish are….” Philosophy Blind Box, https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0166.

Chicago: Zhuangzi. “When the springs dry up and fish are….” Philosophy Blind Box. Accessed 2026. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0166.

Same thinker

More from Zhuangzi

  1. Therefore it is said: The consummate person has no self; the spiritual person has no merit; the sage has no name.
  2. My life has a limit, but knowledge has none. To pursue the limitless with the limited is perilous!
  3. Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly…He did not know whether Zhou had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly was dreaming it was Zhou.
  4. Relying on the heavenly pattern, I strike into the large gaps, guide through the large openings, and follow what is inherently so.
  5. Better to forget one another in the rivers and lakes than to moisten one another with foam when stranded.

All quotations by Zhuangzi

Same theme

More on nature

  1. Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow.
  2. Nothing can be created from nothing by divine agency.
  3. God, or Nature.
  4. [In the state of nature, the life of man is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
  5. Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe…: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Browse the nature theme