| 词汇 | great fleas have lesser fleas |
| 词源 | great fleas have lesser fleas. All of us, no matter how great, have our troubles, our enemies who prey on us. The expression has its roots in Jonathan Swift’s volume of satirical advice to a poet, On Poetry, a Rhapsody (1733), with its lines: “Hobbes clearly proves that every creature/Lives in a state of war by na- ture;/ So naturalists observe a flea/ Has smaller fleas that on him prey,/ And these have smaller still to bite ’em/ And so pro- ceed ad infinitum.” |
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