How do you explain the quote " You can lead a horse to water but that does not make him a duck."?

Answer 1

I'm guessing that was said by a burley northern man, who thinks himself the 'funniest thing since sliced bread'..... am I right?


OR if the person was actually trying to make a valid point.. an analogy might be, you can sit on your dog and whip its bum, but it doesn't make it a horse.

So... if you treat something some way... it doesn't change what it is, fundamentally. Yeah, I'm getting into this now. It's deeply profound, hahaha.

Answer 2

Like a lot of the people here, I have not heard this quote stated this way. If you are looking for "You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink," then the answers above are correct. But, I will take a stab at trying to interpret the quote you have above as if it were not edited.

You can try to change someone by teaching him/her something but no matter how much you teach him/her he/she will never be able to do it better than the person naturally born to do the same thing.

I wish I had heard the conversation where this was used because it would make my answer a lot easier to write.

Answer 3

You are mixing two quotes. One is "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." It means you can direct someone how they should go, give them advice, and, figuratively speaking, lead them, but you can not make them make the decision you want them to make. The second quote is: "If it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck". That means, simply, that a thing or a situation has all the earmarks of being one way, that is probably the way it is, and you can't make anything else out of it.

Answer 4

Never heard that one. Usually people say "You can take the horse to the water but you can't make him drink"

If the horse doesn't want to drink when you get it to the trough or the river, then it won't drink.

It generally means that you can offer ideas/things/opportunities to people but you cannot insist that they accept them.

Of course, you could be mixing this with another saying " If it walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck then it probably is an idiot trying to score points on yahoo answers"

Answer 5

I love a turn of phrase like this. The other day a questioner asked if anyone lived in a shoe. To which I responded: Some shoes smell. My house smells. I live in a shoe."

Well, of course I don't live in a shoe.

Teachers love to ask questions like this to see if you are a critical thinker. It simply means what it says that just because you can lead a horse to water doesn't make him a duck. He's not going to start quacking or lay eggs.

I like to swim in the ocean. That doesn't make me a fish.

Answer 6

You can lead the horse in any direction you want, but you can't make the horse into something it's not.
Another way I've heard this quote is, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink," which means you can't make the horse do anything it doesn't want to do.
Hope that helps.

Answer 7

I have lived in the Deep South all my life and that expression is on I have never heard before.
The saying goes like this in these parts
" You can lead a horse to water but you can not make him drink."
As a general meaning if some one is stubborn like a horse you can show that individual the right way to do something. Yet due to their own stubbornness they will still do it wrong.

Answer 8

I would explain it first of all by saying it is a misquote of "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink." I guess your phrase means about the same thing, that is, a horse is a horse, of course, of course. My favorite spin off is "You can lead a horse to water but have you ever smelled a wet horse?"

Answer 9

Ducks can swim and float on top of the water, a horse cannot. Soooo, the quote is essentially saying you can give someone the tools to change and lead them to a change but you can't change them.

Answer 10

The quote is "you can lead a horse to water but you can`t make him drink." And that means you can lead someone to what ever ,church,occults,or what ever it might be but you can`t make him except or believe in what you have showed or told him or get involved with it.