Good wine needs no bush.
Meaning: Excellent quality requires no advertisement; genuine merit speaks for itself without promotional effort.
Origin: Taverns once hung a bunch of ivy — a "bush," the plant of the wine god Bacchus — outside the door as a sign that wine was sold within. A good wine, the proverb says, needs no advertising. Rosalind uses it in the epilogue of Shakespeare's As You Like It: "If it be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no epilogue."
Equivalents in French, Spanish, Japanese, German, and Italian
- French: A bon vin point d’enseigne (literally: Good wine needs no sign)
- Spanish: Vino que es bueno no ha menester pregonero (literally: Good wine needs no crier)
- Japanese: 桃李もの言わざれども下自ら蹊を成す (Tōri mono iwazaredomo shita mizukara komichi o nasu) (literally: Though the peach and plum trees say nothing, a path forms beneath them of itself)
- German: Guter Wein bedarf keines Kranzes (literally: Good wine needs no wreath)
- Italian: A buon vino non bisogna frasca (literally: Good wine needs no bush)
More proverbs about Morality
- What goes around comes around — Your actions will eventually return to affect you.
- Don't put all your eggs in one basket — Don't risk everything on one venture.
- Two wrongs don't make a right — Responding to wrongdoing with more wrongdoing is never justified.
- Honesty is the best policy — Being truthful is always the right approach.
- You reap what you sow — Your actions determine your outcomes.
- An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind — Revenge only creates more suffering.