Some of the most important things humans have learned, were learned the hard way and then compressed into a proverb so no one forgets. 

This third installment of our series on Chinese proverbs looks at three more idioms and their global echoes: on the trap of a worldview too small to see beyond its own walls, on the small thing left unattended that becomes catastrophe, and on the ancient, universal habit of making elephants out of flies.

1. On narrow thinking: 井底之蛙 (Jing di zhi wa) – The frog at the bottom of the well

This proverb comes from the Zhuangzi, the foundational text of Daoist philosophy attributed to the philosopher Zhuangzi, writing in the 4th century BC – a fabulist who made his philosophical points through stories, often absurdist ones. The frog that lives at the bottom of the well is one of his most enduring characters.

By the standards of its small world, the frog is doing quite well. It has water to swim in, walls to cling to, a circle of sky above it that it takes to be the sky in its entirety. Then a sea turtle walks by and mentions, in passing, the ocean. The frog cannot process this. Its entire conception of "large" and "enough" and "water" has been formed inside this cylinder of stone. The ocean is not just bigger than what it knows, it is an entirely different category of things.

Zhuangzi is not making fun of the frog, and the frog is not stupid; it simply has not been anywhere else and does not even know that it hasn't.

An Arabic proverb makes it social, "the one who hasn't traveled thinks his mother is the best cook." This is warm rather than critical. The person who has never left home has no reference point for comparison, and so their local truth becomes their universal truth.

The English idiom cuts closer to the bone, "can't see the forest for the trees." Here, the limitation is proximity – being so close to the detail that the shape of the whole disappears. 

Another parallel widely used in the Western media theory and philosophy is "a fish doesn't know it's in water."  What surrounds us most completely is often what we see least clearly, meaning you don't know water until you've left your fishbowl. Albert Einstein reached for this same metaphor in 1936 in his essay Self Portrait – "What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?"

All four proverbs, from four different cultures, describe the same cognitive trap we may easily fall into, the way familiarity with a part can blind us to the existence of the whole.

Zhuangzi, writing from a Daoist perspective, would say the answer is movement, both literal and philosophical. Go somewhere else. Think outside the box. Question the box itself. 

2. On small things becoming large: 防微杜渐 (Fang wei du jian) – Prevent the small, stop the gradual

The idiom comes from the Book of the Later Han (Hou Hanshu), the official history of China's Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 25) compiled in the 5th century by Fan Ye. In the book, Eastern Han officials cautioned emperors that decline begins small, almost invisible, and grows precisely because the little threats were not taken seriously at the start. Fang wei means to guard against the minute; du jian means to halt what is gradual. Together, they become "catch it early, before it becomes something you cannot catch at all."

In our modern setting, the lesson can be about attention. It is not that small things are inherently dangerous, but that neglect is. A door left unlocked, a grievance that stays unaddressed, a fracture in a friendship ignored because it seems too minor. The danger lies not in the thing itself but in the assumption that it will resolve on its own.

Somewhere in the mountains of the Caucasus, in the early 20th century the poet named Hovhannes Tumanyan, widely regarded as Armenia's national poet, penned the most beloved fables in Armenian literature, titled Մի կաթիլ մեղր – A drop of honey.

It tells a deceptively simple story. A shepherd arrives at a village shopkeeper's stall to buy honey. As it is being poured, a single drop falls to the floor. The shopkeeper sees no reason to clean it up, after all, it's just a drop. 

But a bee lands on it. The shopkeeper's cat pounces on the bee. The shepherd's dog lunges at the cat. The shopkeeper strikes the dog. The shepherd strikes back. Their families take sides. The villages take sides. What follows is a chain of escalation so swift and so total that by the poem's end, two communities lie in ruins, and the survivors, searching desperately for the origin of the catastrophe, can trace it back to nothing more than a drop of honey on the floor.

The fable was not abstract. Throughout his life, Tumanyan had watched small provocations become massacres. The drop of honey was a warning disguised as a children's fable.

The Chinese idiom and the Armenian fable arrive at the same place from different directions. 防微杜渐 advises vigilance before the small thing grows. Tumanyan's poem shows what happens when this advice goes unheeded. 

3. On exaggeration: 小题大做 (Xiao ti da zuo) – Make a big fuss over a small matter

This idiom talks about the opposite extreme, describing what happens when someone responds to a minor issue with disproportionate energy. It has emerged from the Chinese literary and scholarly tradition as a critique of misplaced effort.

The Russian offers a vivid equivalent, "сделать из мухи слона," literally, to make an elephant out of a fly. The gap between their size is a total loss of proportion, or in modern terms, catastrophizing. How many times have we caught ourselves giving trivial matters too much importance? That being said, two things can be true at the same time – the elephant can feel real to the person who is making it.

The English "making a mountain out of a molehill" works in the same register. The Romans had "arcem ex cloaca facere," to make a citadel out of a sewer. Erasmus recorded it in his Adages in the 16th century, suggesting it was already ancient by then.

Another equivalent, with a slight variation, would be "a storm in a teacup" by the British or "a tempest in a teapot" used by Americans. Both mean creating unnecessary drama over something trivial. This rendition goes back to antiquity – Cicero used a Latin version "excitatio tempestatis in simpulo" (literally, stirring up a storm in a ladle), which later evolved through European languages into the modern expressions.

The lessons behind these proverbs

All of these are gently corrective. The Russian friend who says "не делай из мухи слона" – don't make an elephant out of a fly – is not dismissing your concern. They are offering perspective. 

We let small things grow into large catastrophes because we are not paying attention. We make elephants out of flies because our emotions overwhelm our judgment. We swim in our well blissfully ignorant of the seas and the ocean.

Documented in Chinese classical texts, Russian folk speech, Western philosophy or Armenian poetry alike, the fact that so many different traditions felt the need to name these tendencies, compress them into memorable phrases, teach to children and repeat to adults, suggests something important – we, as humans, have always known our own weak points. We simply need some gentle reminding.

That is, perhaps, what proverbs are really for.

Editor's note: Zaruhi Poghosyan is a multimedia editor for CGTN Digital. This article is part of China, Soft Focus — a slow journalism series that offers human-centered glimpses into culture, history and everyday life across China through measured pace and intimate storytelling.

Also read: Lost in translation? These proverbs never were | Pt.1 and Pt.2