“The game is not worth the candle”in other languages

Same idea, different pictures

The candle comes from French gambling. Card players paid for the light, and when the stakes were small the winnings wouldn't cover it: le jeu n'en vaut pas la chandelle. The saying traveled almost unchanged into English (John Florio's 1603 Montaigne has “the play is not worth the candle”), Italian, Polish and Russian, which puts the candles in the plural.

Other languages weigh other things. Dutch says the broth isn't worth the cabbage, het sop is de kool niet waard, and Spanish that the collar costs more than the dog, sale más caro el collar que el perro.

Chinese and Japanese say it outright. Chinese 得不偿失 means the gain doesn't make up for the loss, an idea already in the 5th-century Book of the Later Han. Japanese 労多くして功少なし, much toil and little merit, appears in an official history entry for the year 737.