- Work
- The Lion and the Mouse
- Catalogue
- Perry Index 150 · Aesop’s Fables
- Documented moral
- “A kindness is never wasted” (1919 Aesop for Children)
- Popular wording
- Undated modern paraphrase
“You laughed when I said I would repay you,” said the Mouse. “Now you see that even a Mouse can help a Lion.” Moral: A kindness is never wasted.
The moral, not a sentence Aesop wrote
This is the closing of the fable in the 1919 Aesop for Children. The popular quote — “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted” — is a modern expansion of that terse moral, not a line found in any standard translation.
The Lion and the Mouse (Aesop for Children, 1919) ↗
How we traced it
- Wikiquote’s Aesop page lists the line under general “Quotes” sourced only to “The Lion and the Mouse,” with no translator or edition given.
- The Library of Congress’s Aesop for Children (1919) states the moral as “A kindness is never wasted” — the closest documented antecedent.
- The scholarly Fables of Aesop collates many translations (Perry 150); none use the popular one-liner, giving morals like “A kindness is never wasted” and “Small causes may produce great results.”
- The J. H. Stickney edition on Project Gutenberg gives a wholly different moral — “The weak have their place in the world as truly as the strong” — showing how the wording varies by translator.
The ancient fable is public domain, and the pre-1931 moral “A kindness is never wasted” (1919 Aesop for Children) would itself be public domain. But the exact displayed wording — “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted” — is an anonymous modern paraphrase with no identifiable translator and no documented pre-1931 appearance, so we assert no copyright status for it.
In the fable, a lion spares a trembling mouse who has stumbled across his paws; later, caught in a hunter’s net, the same lion is freed when the mouse gnaws through the ropes. The story turns on a simple reversal — the powerless creature repays the powerful one — and its moral has been rendered many ways: “A kindness is never wasted,” “Little friends may prove great friends,” “No one is too small to help.”
The modern one-liner distills all of these into a single quotable sentence. That polish is exactly why it reads as a coined aphorism rather than a translation: it is smoother and more absolute than anything in the ancient text, which is the usual fingerprint of a paraphrase.
The lesson is ancient; the sentence is modern.