Fable IX The Dog and the Shadow
A Dog, crossing a little rivulet with a piece of flesh in his mouth, saw his own shadow represented in the clear mirror of the limpid stream; and believing it to be another Dog who was carrying another piece of flesh, he could not forbear catching at it; but was so far from getting anything by his greedy design, that he dropt the piece he had in his mouth, which immediately sunk to the bottom, and was irrecoverably lost.
Morals
Excessive greediness mostly in the end misses what it aims at; disorderly appetites seldom obtain what they would have; passions mislead men, and often bring them into great straits and inconveniences, through heedlessness and negligence.
Base is the man who pines amidst his store,
And fat with plenty, griping, covets more:
But doubly vile, by av’rice when betray’d,
He quits the substance for an empty shade.
Reflection
It is wisely decreed that vice should carry its own punishment along with it. Therefore he that catches at more than belongs to him, justly deserves to lose what he has; yet nothing is more common, and, at the same time, more pernicious, than this selfish principle. It prevails from the king to the peasant; and all orders and degrees of men are, more or less, infected with it. Great monarchs have been drawn in, by this greedy humour, to grasp at the dominions of their neighbours; not that they wanted anything more to feed their luxury, but to gratify their insatiable appetite for vainglory. If the Kings of Persia could have been contented with their own vast territories, they had not lost all Asia, for the sake of a little petty state of Greece. And France, with all its glory, has, ere now, been reduced to the last extremity by the same unjust incroachments.
He that thinks he sees another’s estate in a pack of cards, or a box and dice, and ventures his own in the pursuit of it, should not repine if he finds himself a beggar in the end.