“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day”: did Laozi say it?
Not in the Dao De Jing
No: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day” is not in the Dao De Jing; Quote Investigator traces it to Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie's novel Mrs. Dymond (1885).
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
The nearest lines in the Dao De Jing
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太上，下知有之。
The great masters: those below only know they exist.
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功成事遂，
Deed accomplished and task successful,
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百姓皆谓我自然。
the people all say: "It happened of itself."
Where it comes from
The saying is in no chapter of the Dao De Jing; Wikiquote lists it among the sayings wrongly credited to Laozi, and notes that it is also given to Confucius. Quote Investigator traced it to a novel, Mrs. Dymond (1885) by Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, where a character says that if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour, and if you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn. Later versions sharpened it: “richer all his life” in 1911, and in 1961 a missionary who had worked in China called it a “Chinese proverb” and said teaching would “feed him for a lifetime”. The first link to Laozi it found is a 1976 book on Africa, “To paraphrase Lao-tse and Chairman Mao”; in 1986 a Yoga Journal article said plainly that Laozi said it.
What the Dao De Jing says instead
The book has no fish and no teaching of skills. The nearest idea, people who end up providing for themselves, closes chapter 17 on the best rulers, of whom “those below only know they exist”: 功成事遂, “Deed accomplished and task successful”, the people say: “It happened of itself.” The good ruler is barely noticed, so the people believe they did it themselves. Nothing is taught.