can’t have your cake and eat it too: idiomatic equivalents in other languages
A French equivalent expression is: vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre, meaning literally to want the butter and the money for the butter. The idiom can be emphasized by adding et le sourire de la crémière (“and the smile of the female buttermaker”).
The expression avere la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca (“to have the barrel full and the wife drunk”) is used in Italy with an equivalent meaning.
In Spanish, querer estar en misa y en procesión (“wishing to be both at Mass and in the procession”) and nadar y guardar la ropa (“swimming and keeping an eye on the removed clothes”) are similar in meaning.
There is a Serbian equivalent as well, Не можеш да имаш и јаре и паре (“You can’t have both goatling and money”).
Similarly, in Chinese, “又要马儿跑，又要马儿不吃草” (pinyin: Yòu yào mǎ’er pǎo, yòu yào mǎ’er bu chī cǎo.) meaning “To want a horse that both runs fast and consumes no feed.”
There is a Greek equivalent as well: “Και την πίτα ολόκληρη και τον σκύλο χορτάτο” (“you want the pie whole and the dog full”).
A similar expression in Swiss German is Du chasch nit dr Füfer und s Weggli ha (“you can’t have the five cent coin and a -certain type of swiss- bread roll”).
A Nepalese equivalent also exists that goes dubai haat ma laddu, which means having laddu (a sweet candy) in both your hands.
In Argentina, the expression la chancha y los veinte literally means “the pig and the twenties”. It comes from the old piggybanks for children that used to contain coins of 20 cents. The only way to get the coins was to break the piggyback open — hence the phrase. This can be emphasized by adding y la máquina de hacer chorizos, which translates to “and the machine to make sausage”.
In Bulgaria, it is quite common for the expression “И вълкът сит, и агнето цяло” (“The wolf is full, and the lamb - whole.”) to be used.
In German, an equivalent proverb goes: wasch’ mir den Pelz, aber mach mich nicht naß! - “please wash my fur (or hair), but don’t get me wet!”
ULTRAVIOLET ULTRAVIOLENT: love in a few words
i ask too much of the ones i love. i ask you to be holy, i ask you be foolish and sorry, i ask you to keep me sane. i ask to be saved, to flounder in the tar pits of your dark heart. i feel something in your arms that i have not felt in all my days. and now i fear this feeling is fleeting and i do…
(Source: and-the-rest-is-history)
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There’s nothing wrong with being happy. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying something so much that it strips away all that irony and cynicism. And there’s nothing wrong with loving anything so much that it feels like it could pull your heart out of your chest and toss it on the floor. We build ourselves up to not do that, and then we build up the armor so thickly that we have trouble finding what’s underneath. We use that as an excuse to lash out at people who do feel stuff, who do like things (and I am, of course, mostly saying this about myself). It’s hard sometimes to remember that the world isn’t a place to glide through, so nothing can touch you. It’s a place to be experienced.
Todd VanDerWerff
(Source: lucy-vanpelt)
