Beware of Greed

A man and his wife owned a goose which laid a golden egg every day. They considered themselves very lucky to possess such a rare bird, and they began to wonder just how much gold the goose must have inside it.

So they cut open the goose, killing it. However, to their disappointment, they discovered that the inside of the bird was like any other goose and was not made of gold. In killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, they had deprived themselves of a regular source of gold.

The moral of ‘The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs’ is fairly obviously that greed is bad: if the man and his wife had not been motivated by avarice, or greed for more gold, they would not have cut open the goose and thus they would not have deprived themselves of a smaller, though regular and steady and reliable, source of income from their special bird. The ‘I want it all and I want it now’ attitude which leads them to kill the goose, in the hope of discovering even greater riches inside it, is their undoing.