Life & Wisdom Quote by Hesiod

"Potter is jealous of potter, and craftsman of craftsman; and the poor have a grudge against the poor, and the poet against the poet"

Hesiod, Poet

About this Quote

Hesiod’s line has the bite of a poet who knows his village too well: envy isn’t aimed upward at the untouchable elite but sideways at the person close enough to be a mirror. The repetition - potter against potter, craftsman against craftsman - turns competition into a drumbeat, making resentment feel structural, almost occupational. It’s not just that people want what others have; they can’t stand that someone like them is getting ahead.

The subtext is brutal and anti-romantic about community. We like to imagine solidarity among the struggling, a natural alliance of the poor, the working, the creative. Hesiod insists the opposite: scarcity doesn’t purify character, it sharpens suspicion. When status and survival depend on small margins - one more customer, one better harvest, one patron’s attention - your nearest rival is your neighbor, not your overlord.

Context matters. Hesiod writes from the hard-edged agrarian world of Archaic Greece, where social mobility is limited, institutions are thin, and reputation is currency. His Works and Days is obsessed with labor, fairness, and the petty injustices that govern daily life; the line reads like field notes on how a community frays under pressure. The last clause, “poet against the poet,” is also self-aware: he’s implicating his own trade, where “inspiration” competes with patronage, and fame is zero-sum. It’s wisdom literature with claws - a warning that rivalry is not an anomaly but the default setting when people are forced to measure their worth in public.

Quote Details

Topic	Wisdom
Source	Help us find the source
Cite

More Quotes by Hesiod Add to List

About the Author

Hesiod

Hesiod (800 BC - 720 BC) was a Poet from Greece.

35 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

"The poet must decide not to impose his feelings in order to write without sentimentality"

John Barton, Poet

John Barton

"The generous Critic fann'd the Poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire"

Edgar Allan Poe, Poet

Edgar Allan Poe

"All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is"

Harold Bloom, Critic

Harold Bloom

"Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is"

James Branch Cabell, Novelist

"Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words"

Helen Dunmore, Poet

"Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true"

William Shenstone, Poet

"The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do"

Mark Van Doren, Poet

"If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty"

Rainer Maria Rilke, Poet

"If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making"

E. E. Cummings, Poet

E. E. Cummings

"So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman"

Allen Tate, Poet

"There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman"

Emile Zola, Novelist

Emile Zola

"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses"

Jean Cocteau, Director

Jean Cocteau

"All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet"

Stevie Smith, Poet

"The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten"

Edith Sitwell, Poet

"Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place"

Charles Baudelaire, Poet

Charles Baudelaire

"In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem"

Allen Tate, Poet

"The poet does not know - often he will never know - whom he really writes for"

Eugenio Montale, Poet

"Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet"

Oliver Goldsmith, Poet

"He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life"

George Sand, Novelist

George Sand

"It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back"

Marianne Moore, Poet