Meaning & Analysis
Do not extend your arm beyond the length of your sleeve, suggesting a natural or practical limit beyond which one should not go.
Insights
Live Within Your Means
The proverb advises financial moderation: one should not spend beyond what their resources (their 'sleeve') allow, encouraging frugality and careful budgeting.
Know Your Limits
It urges individuals to act within the bounds of their abilities, social status, or authority, discouraging overreach or pretension.
Avoid Overambition
Warns against excessive aspiration that ignores realistic constraints, emphasizing the virtue of prudence over reckless pursuit.
Tudor-Era Economic Morality
Emerging in 16th-century England, this proverb reflects the era's concern with social stability through economic discipline—frugality being not just practical, but morally virtuous.
Moralized Body Imagery
The body-and-garment metaphor embodies moral control: the 'sleeve' symbolizing propriety or provision, the 'arm' representing will or desire—suggesting desire must be clothed in discipline.
Social Self-Awareness
Psychologically, the proverb reflects the importance of self-awareness and situational judgment—knowing how far to extend oneself without embarrassment, failure, or harm.
Rhetorical Devices
Metaphor
The arm and sleeve metaphor translates the abstract concept of limitation into a vivid, tactile image easily understood across classes and generations.
Synecdoche
The 'arm' stands in for ambition or action; the 'sleeve' for means or provision—allowing the parts to represent broader life realities.
Proverbial Parallelism
The phrase’s balanced structure ('stretch... no farther than...') gives it rhetorical elegance and memorability, enhancing its function as a moral maxim.
Transcription
Quotations
Strech out thine arme no farther then thy slyve wyll retche.
Put thy hand no farther than thy sleeve will reach.
I take some heed not to extend my sleeve beyond mine arm.
For pleasure or credit they stretch their hands further then their sleues will reatch.
My sutes were silke, my talke was all of State, I stretcht beyond the compasse of my sleeue.
Put your hand no further nor your sleev may reach.
(arms)
[As in a1598 Ferg.]
Put your arm no further than your sleeve will give leave.
(Thrust your arm)
(Put your Hand)
Annotations
- That is, spend no more than your Estate will bear.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.