12 Japanese Proverbs: 6 for Perseverance, 6 That Tell You to Rest

You probably arrived here at the end of a long day, typing something like japanese proverbs about perseverance into a search box, hoping a four-hundred-year-old sentence would tell you to keep going.

Every list you’ll find says the same thing. Fall down seven times, get up eight. Sit on a rock for three years. Continuation is power. Push, endure, don’t stop.

Here is what those lists leave out: Japanese has an entire second tradition of proverbs that tell you to stop. Not to give up — to stop. One of them is credited to a rice trader whose invention is still on every trading screen in the world, and it says, plainly, that doing nothing is a move.

I run a small coffee-and-handiwork shop in Japan called Fudemame. Over the past year I read and sorted several hundred kotowaza to build a notebook of one hundred of them, and I checked the origin of each one against Japanese sources rather than English blogs. That sorting is what this article is: twelve proverbs, six for the tired and six for the striving, with the actual Japanese, the actual origins, and one honest warning about the ones you’ve been sharing.

Disclosure: the notebook described at the end of this article is one I made, and the links to it are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases — and every bit of it goes toward buying coffee beans for the shop.

Every list of Japanese proverbs is missing half the tradition

Before the twelve, two things you should know about the genre you’ve been reading — because both of them change what you do with the rest of this page.

The English-language canon of “Japanese proverbs” has two problems. Some of its most popular entries aren’t Japanese. And the ones that are have been filtered through a single, narrow idea of what Japanese wisdom is for.

The most-shared “Japanese proverbs” in English are not Japanese

In September 2026 I ran a search across an index of high-performing social posts, sorted by how far each one outperformed its own author’s baseline, looking for anything tagged as a Japanese proverb. The top three results were these:

I could not find a Japanese source for any of the three. No kotowaza dictionary entry, no classical text, no attributed author. They appear to be aphorisms written in English and given a Japanese passport on the way out the door.

I’m not pointing this out to be smug about it. I’m pointing it out because of what the three have in common. Not one of them says work harder. The bus one says the delay protected you. The tree one says growing fast is dangerous. The mask one says stop performing. The single best-performing “Japanese proverb” in English is a permission slip to slow down — and it had to be invented, because the real ones that say exactly that never made it into the lists.

The other half of the tradition never made the lists

I read the two largest English roundups on this topic — one with 47 proverbs, one with 48. Between them they sort nearly a hundred sayings into categories: life, love, friendship, wisdom, perseverance, death, humour.

Neither has a category for rest. Not one entry, across 95 proverbs, presented as being about stopping. The closest either comes is 三日坊主 (mikka bōzu), the “three-day monk,” and both file it under people who give up too easily.

So the picture an English reader ends up with is a culture of pure endurance — gaman, grit, the rock you sit on for three years. That picture isn’t wrong. It’s half.

Here is the other half first, because it’s the half you came for.

Six proverbs for the days you need to stop

These six are not consolation prizes for people who couldn’t hack it. Three of them come from the most demanding contexts a person can be in — a commodities market, a road you have to travel before dark, and a philosopher arguing about what wealth actually is. They earned the right to say stop.

休むも相場 — Yasumu mo sōba

Japanese: 休むも相場
Romaji: Yasumu mo sōba
Literally: “Resting, too, is the market.”
Meaning: Not trading is itself a position. There are three moves available to you — buy, sell, and sit still — and the third is a real one.

Picture the Osaka rice exchanges of the 1700s. A trader has had a bad week. Every instinct tells him to trade his way out of it, to do something, because doing something feels like control. The maxim that survives from that world tells him the opposite: step back from the market and watch it for a while. And it adds a detail that stings — the worse your losses, the more you need to rest. Panic is when the instinct to act is strongest and the judgment behind it is weakest.

The maxim is generally credited to Munehisa Homma, an 18th-century rice trader from Sakata who is also widely credited with developing candlestick charting — the red-and-green bars still on the screen of every trader reading this sentence. The man who gave the world its most-used market chart also left behind a line saying that the correct move, some days, is no move.

Sources: Nomura Securities glossary · Daiwa Securities glossary

急がば回れ — Isogaba maware

Japanese: 急がば回れ
Romaji: Isogaba maware
Literally: “If you hurry, go around.”
Meaning: The fast route is the one that fails. Take the long way.

This one has a map. The proverb comes from a poem by Sōchō, a linked-verse poet of the Muromachi period: mononofu no / Yabase no fune wa / hayakeredo / isogaba maware / Seta no Nagahashi.

A samurai heading for Kyoto stands on the shore of Lake Biwa. In front of him is the boat from Yabase — straight across the water, obviously faster. Around to his right is the long bridge at Seta, a detour that costs him real hours. The poem tells him to take the bridge. The wind coming down off Mount Hiei capsizes those boats.

So this is not a proverb about patience as a virtue. It’s about a specific stretch of water where the shortcut kills people. Whatever your Yabase boat is this week — the version you ship without testing, the conversation you have over text instead of in person — the proverb is asking whether you’ve checked the wind.

Source: 語源由来辞典 (Japanese etymology dictionary)

足るを知る者は富む — Taru wo shiru mono wa tomu

Japanese: 足るを知る者は富む
Romaji: Taru wo shiru mono wa tomu
Literally: “The one who knows sufficiency is rich.”
Meaning: Wealth is a ratio, and you can change the denominator.

An honest footnote most English lists skip: this one is Chinese before it is Japanese. It comes from chapter 33 of the Tao Te Ching — 知足者富, chi zu zhe fu — where it sits inside a run of paired lines about self-knowledge: knowing others is intelligence, knowing yourself is clarity; beating others takes force, beating yourself takes strength; knowing enough is wealth.

It entered Japanese and stayed, most visibly as 吾唯足知 (ware tada taru wo shiru), the four characters arranged around a square water basin at Ryōan-ji in Kyoto, where each one borrows the basin’s opening as its shared radical. You cannot read the phrase without the hole in the middle. That’s the design.

Source: 『老子』第三十三章

知らぬが仏 — Shiranu ga hotoke

Japanese: 知らぬが仏
Romaji: Shiranu ga hotoke
Literally: “Not knowing is Buddha.”
Meaning: The person who doesn’t know wears the calm face of a buddha. The knowing is what disturbs you.

English renders this “ignorance is bliss,” which carries a sneer the Japanese doesn’t have. Hotoke is a face — serene, unbothered, slightly amused. The proverb isn’t mocking the ignorant person. It’s noticing that their peace is real.

Read it in 2026 and it turns into something the people who first said it couldn’t have meant: a case for not checking. The analytics at 11pm. The thread about you. The number that will be the same tomorrow whether or not you look at it tonight.

明日は明日の風が吹く — Ashita wa ashita no kaze ga fuku

Japanese: 明日は明日の風が吹く
Romaji: Ashita wa ashita no kaze ga fuku
Literally: “Tomorrow, tomorrow’s wind will blow.”
Meaning: Tomorrow arrives with its own weather. Today’s forecast is not billed to you tonight.

The line most people know in English is Scarlett O’Hara’s “tomorrow is another day” — and that is in fact how Gone with the Wind‘s closing line is usually translated in Japan, which is why the proverb sounds cinematic to Japanese ears too. But it predates the film, and it’s blunter than the translation suggests. It’s not optimism. It doesn’t promise a better wind. It just points out that tonight you have no information about it, so worrying is work you can’t actually do yet.

三日坊主 — Mikka bōzu

Japanese: 三日坊主
Romaji: Mikka bōzu
Literally: “Three-day monk.”
Meaning: Someone who takes up monastic life, finds the 3am wake-ups unbearable, and is gone by Thursday. A quitter.

Every English list files this under criticism, and that’s the standard reading — it’s a tease, usually aimed at yourself.

But sit with the fact of it. A language only mints a compact, affectionate, slightly funny word for a behaviour that happens constantly. Japanese did not coin a term for the person who quits after three days because it’s rare and shameful. It coined one because everybody does it, all the time, forever, and the culture needed a light way to say so.

Which reframes the joke. If you’re three days into something and fading, you are not failing at an unusual thing. You are doing the thing that’s so common it has a nickname. That’s not a verdict. It’s company.

Six proverbs for the days you need to begin

The other half is the half you already half-know — and they’re famous for a reason. These are the ones people get tattooed, put on office walls, and say to their kids. Here they are with their actual weight restored.

七転び八起き — Nana korobi ya oki

Literally: “Seven falls, eight risings.”
Meaning: Get up one more time than you go down.

The arithmetic is the whole poem. Seven falls, but eight risings — one more rise than fall, because the first one, the one nobody counts, is standing up as a child. You were always already in the middle of this.

継続は力なり — Keizoku wa chikara nari

Literally: “Continuation is strength.”
Meaning: The continuing itself is the power. Not the talent underneath it.

Note the grammar: continuation is strength. It doesn’t say continuation produces strength later, as a reward. The showing up is the thing itself, on the day you do it, including the days it accomplishes nothing visible.

塵も積もれば山となる — Chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru

Literally: “Even dust, piled up, becomes a mountain.”
Meaning: Small amounts accumulate into large ones.

The choice of noun does the work. Not sand, not stones — 塵, chiri, the dust you sweep up and throw away. The most worthless possible unit. That’s the point: the increment can be genuinely negligible and the total can still be a mountain.

石の上にも三年 — Ishi no ue ni mo san nen

Literally: “Even on a rock, three years.”
Meaning: Sit on a cold stone long enough and it warms. Hard things yield to duration.

Three years is a specific and slightly brutal number, and it’s the honest part of the proverb. It doesn’t say keep going and you’ll feel better soon. It says the stone is cold for a long time and that’s normal.

雨垂れ石を穿つ — Amadare ishi wo ugatsu

Literally: “Raindrops pierce the stone.”
Meaning: Persistent small force beats large hard resistance, given time.

The sibling of the dust proverb, with one difference: here the opposition is real. Dust piling up meets no resistance. Water against rock loses every single encounter and wins the war anyway.

苦あれば楽あり — Ku areba raku ari

Literally: “If there is hardship, there is ease.”
Meaning: They alternate. Neither one is the permanent state.

The most-quoted half is the encouraging one — hardship now, ease later. But the sentence is symmetrical and the reverse reading is also intended: ease now, hardship later. It’s not a promise. It’s a description of a cycle, which means it belongs to both halves of this article at once.

Further reading on this group: nippon.com, “Dust into Mountains: Patience and Perseverance in Japanese Proverbs”

How to tell which half you’re in today

Twelve proverbs is a nice thing to read and a useless thing to own, unless you can tell which six apply to you this morning. Here is the sorting question I actually use, in three parts.

1. Is the obstacle outside you or inside you?
Outside — a market, a slow process, a skill that takes years — is a resolve day. 石の上にも三年. The stone is cold and you sit on it.
Inside — you can’t think straight, you reread the same paragraph four times, you’re arguing with people in your head — is a rest day. 休むも相場. Judgment is the tool that’s broken, and you cannot fix a broken tool by using it harder.

2. If you did nothing today, what would actually break?
Answer it concretely, with names and dates. Most of the time the honest answer is nothing until Thursday. That’s 明日は明日の風が吹く, and it’s data, not laziness.
If something genuinely breaks today, you’re in resolve. Go.

3. Are you rushing because it’s urgent, or because rushing feels like progress?
This is 急がば回れ, and it’s the one that catches me. The Yabase boat is always faster on paper. Check the wind before you get in.

Why reading a proverb does nothing, and writing one does

You have now read twelve proverbs. Be honest about what happens next: in about four days you will remember roughly one of them, and it will probably be the trader who said resting is a position, because it had a person and a chart attached to it.

That isn’t a failure of attention. It’s how reading works. A sentence you read passes through at reading speed, which is far faster than the speed at which anything gets kept.

Writing one down by hand is slower on purpose. You have to commit to every character, which means you have to have decided you want that particular sentence, which is already more choosing than a scroll asks of you. This isn’t a modern productivity idea; it’s roughly what a hypomnēmata was in the ancient world — a personal notebook of other people’s lines, copied out by hand and kept, so the borrowed sentence had somewhere to sit until it stopped being borrowed.

The test of whether a proverb is yours isn’t whether you can quote it. It’s whether it arrives on its own, on the right day, in a voice that sounds like yours.

A notebook for the days in between

I made a thing for this, and I’ll describe it plainly rather than sell it.

Fudemame Notebook: 100 Japanese Proverbs for Rest and Resolve is a 104-page A5 lined journal. Along the foot of each page sits one Japanese proverb — the original Japanese, the romaji, a plain-English translation, and three short lines on what it means. One hundred of them, sorted the way this article is sorted: half for the tired, half for the striving. The twelve above are in it.

Twenty ruled lines per page are yours. The proverb sits underneath your own handwriting, which is the arrangement I wanted — not a page that tells you what to write, just a page that has something quiet at the bottom of it on the day you need one.

The rabbits and frogs through the book are from Chōjū-giga, the “Scrolls of Frolicking Animals” — a 12th-century National Treasure of Japan, held by Kōsan-ji temple in the hills northwest of Kyoto, and frequently called the world’s oldest manga. The 44 illustrations are drawn by hand and used with the temple’s permission.

It was made by a coffee shop, slowly, for people who like sitting with a cup and a pen. If that’s the kind of object you want on the table, it’s on Amazon here.

If you would rather fill every page yourself, the same Chōjū-giga animals also live in two earlier volumes without the proverbs — just the rabbits, the frogs, and room to write.

And if you’d rather just take the twelve and go: take 休むも相場. Resting is also a position. Some days that’s the whole strategy.

About the author

KOHEI TAKEDA runs Fudemame (喫茶ふでまめ), a weekend coffee-and-handiwork shop in Japan, and is the author of Fudemame Notebook: 100 Japanese Proverbs for Rest and Resolve (2026). Every proverb in this article was checked against Japanese-language sources — securities glossaries, etymology dictionaries, and classical texts — rather than English secondary sources, and the origins are linked above so you can check them yourself. If you’re choosing a notebook more generally, I’ve also written an honest guide to the best Japanese notebooks.

Last verified: 1 September 2026.

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