Meaning & Analysis
Every rise in the landscape is paired with a lower ground; a hill necessarily implies a neighboring valley (dale).
Insights
Inevitable Downturns
Where there is elevation—success, joy, glory—there will also be a descent or lull. Peaks attract their own troughs; nothing remains at summit level forever.
Complementary Opposites
Highs and lows define each other. The ‘valley’ gives contour to the ‘hill,’ just as sorrow sharpens the meaning of happiness and loss clarifies gain.
Cycle of Fortune
Fortune moves in cycles: ascent invites exposure and fatigue, followed by rest or reversal. Expectation of alternation fosters steadiness amid change.
Perspective and Measure
Without a valley, a hill would scarcely seem high. Value is comparative; perspective—standing in the low—reveals the true scale of the high.
Humility in Prosperity
The line counsels modesty at altitude: remember the valley that borders your hill, and you will handle success with grace and caution.
Topographic Truth as Ethic
The proverb borrows a physical necessity—relief requires both rise and dip—to naturalize moral wisdom about alternation in human affairs.
Stoic Consolation
For the downcast, the logic reverses: if valleys attend hills, then lows imply a nearby rise. The saying thus steadies both triumph and dejection.
Relational Identity
Like many binaries (light/shadow, feast/fast), hill and valley are relational, not absolute. The proverb teaches that meaning emerges from contrasts, not isolated states.
Aesthetic of Contrast
Landscape painters and poets rely on chiaroscuro: depth appears where highs meet lows. The line gestures toward a broader aesthetic principle—variety makes beauty legible.
Moral Optics
The neighboring ‘vale’ also ‘discovers’ the hill: adversity exposes character formed in prosperity, and prosperity exposes habits formed in want.
Rhetorical Devices
Antithesis
Sets ‘hill’ against ‘valley’ to dramatize the interplay of opposite conditions, turning geography into moral dialectic.
Merism
By naming two extremes (high/low), the proverb implies the whole terrain of experience, suggesting an encompassing law of life.
Universal Quantifier
‘There is no… without…’ gives it categorical force, making the counsel feel like a law rather than a mere observation.
Metaphor of Elevation
Maps topography to fortune and feeling, letting a visible landscape carry invisible vicissitudes.
Euphony
The l-sounds in ‘hill’/‘valley’ and the rolling cadence suit a gently didactic, memorable tone.
Transcription
Quotations
Euerie hill hath his dale.
There's no deepe Valley, but neere some great Hill.
(without his valley).
Every mountain hath its valley, and every ascent its descent.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.