Lo que con mucho trabajo se adquiere...

10:17 May 31, 2018 

Hombre, no he dicho que sea necesariamente una derivación, solo que no creo que sea de Aristóteles. Yo sigo reivindicando a mi amigo Basilio, pero cada loco con su tema...

10:13 May 31, 2018 

Coincido con Charles en que la frase en cuestión parece una derivación y no una cita auténtica. De hecho, diría que deriva del conocido per aspera ad astra, cuyo original encontramos en Séneca; Non est ad astra mollis e terris via.

Esta expresión resume la frase de Lucio Anneo Séneca (Hercules furens, acto II, v 437) Non est ad astra mollis e terris via; no es fácil el camino que de la tierra lleva a los astros, entendiéndolo así:
el éxito es el final de un camino lleno de obstáculos que se consigue sólo con esfuerzo, por eso cuánto más díficil es un objetivo mayor es la satisfacción al alcanzarlo.
http://clasicascheste.blogspot.com/2007/01/per-aspera-ad-ast...

18:22 May 30, 2018 

and maybe it was a gatekeeper... but that's a guess (educated, but still in the air). The lack of coincidence was also what I found suspicious.

18:16 May 30, 2018 

I can't help thinking that there's something very odd here. Here we have an extremely common Spanish saying, quoted in exactly the same form (with occasional minor variants such as "esfuerzo" for "trabajo" and "obtiene" for "adquiere") in hundreds of websites and books, attributed to Aristotle, though the source is never identified. In English we have nothing comparable at all. I'm sure several of us have spent time today googling every plausible English version we can think of, and there's just nothing there. It's all very well for Phil to say that it's been said and written a million times, but where is the evidence of that in English? There is simply no such established expression, and if it were from Aristotle there surely would be.

So I think we must be dealing here with a saying that has a Spanish source, from which it has been endlessly copied. The Spanish saying could have been coined as is or could have been translated from a more remote source in Latin (as I believe). I've only been able to trace it back to Argentina in the 1940s from online sources. Who knows how far back it goes.

18:10 May 30, 2018 

& reading your references, I remember using encyclopedias from ideological ages that I had to cross-check and double-check to make sense of. I imagined the gatekeepers for Aristotle - including in Arabic, and can you blame me?

16:17 May 30, 2018 

Sorry if I misunderstood you :-)

It can't be proved, and it certainly could be a coincidence. But the sermon-collection-to-florilegium theory is not as implausible as it might sound; both these genres were hugely popular a few centuries ago. And things got copied and recopied, much as they are today. The Internet can't solve this: the missing links may well exist but if so they're not in Google Books.

I found a Chilean page that gave authentic Aristotle quotations in Greek and Spanish, with exact references, and then a few unidentified ones attributed to Aristotle at the bottom, including this one. The attribution really seems phony to me.

16:02 May 30, 2018 

But me being the stickler for spadework that I am, this is the top thingy I can say!

15:51 May 30, 2018 

Well, take it or leave it, as you wish. I was hoping you would appreciate the result rather than the effort.

I really am pretty sure Aristotle didn't write this. Does anyone have another possible source?

15:48 May 30, 2018 

Yes, the same idea has probably been expressed independently by a number of people. But the Latin sentence which is explicitly derived from St Basil commentary is so close to the Spanish that the latter is really a literal translation of it (down to "se ama"/"amantur").

There were many anthologies of sentences of this kind in earlier centuries (certainly in Spain), for people to quote so as to make themselves seem learned. They were copied from each other, and the attributions were sometimes lost. I am sure that the source of this particular Spanish tag is St Basil the Great.

I am also virtually certain that St Basil is not quoting anybody. When patristic authors are quoting, they say so.

The gloss on the Talmud you have quoted is pretty close to the same statement, but it says "effort you expend on something" rather than acquiring it by effort, and of course it's a modern gloss; the Talmud text itself expresses a similar thought but there's no verbal resemblance.

15:41 May 30, 2018 

and with so many lost manuscripts how can anyone tell?

15:38 May 30, 2018 

'The Talmud tells us: "Lefum’ Tza’arah Agrah,” äccording to the travail is the reward. You get out of things what you put into them; the more effort you expend on something, the more you appreciate and value it.'
http://www.isralight.org/assets/Text/RBF_sukkot11.pdf

15:29 May 30, 2018 

Even if you're going to leave it out and tell the customer why, mine is still a correct translation of the Spanish.

15:09 May 30, 2018 

St Basil the Great (Basil of Caeserea) (329/30-379), Commentary on Isaiah. See reference below.

14:04 May 30, 2018 

but I'd rather flag it, thanks. The customer's not the type that can afford misquotes, even in examples.

12:24 May 30, 2018 

Sorry, I didn't read the last sentence of your question. I'd just translate it.
I'm not sure I agree with it - I love my dog, and the interest on my bank account, neither of which cost me any effort to acquire :-)

12:22 May 30, 2018 

The internet is full of made-up quotes, most of them attributed to Albert Einstein in my experience. You can either just translate this and be done with it, and it's very easy, or you can flag it to the customer. This depends on how important it is - for example, you probably wouldn't put a fake quote in a big company's annual report.

10:35 May 30, 2018 

wait till I tell the client :P

09:47 May 30, 2018 

All I can tell you is that this saying was favoured by the Argentine Ministry of Agriculture in the 1940s, and in one case it's attributed to Phocylides rather than Aristotle. But that has got me no further forward.
https://books.google.es/books?id=mAXnAAAAMAAJ&q="Lo que con ...

If the can't be identified but it still needs to be translated, the matter is discussed here:
https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/lo-que-con-mucho-tra...

08:38 May 30, 2018 

is the only quote by Aristotle that I remember in this context...

Aristotle believes that moral virtue is the result of habit and you can become good through practice -- if one practices good moral virtues, one will have good moral habits. We are born with the capacity to be good and bad, but it takes time to develop this. Hence, practice makes perfect.

https://www.google.pt/search?q="practice makes perfect" aris...