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  • Haste makes waste
    Haste makes waste
    Acting too quickly may actually slow things down.
  • haste makes waste
    haste makes waste
    Proceeding too quickly can spoil an enterprise, as in Stop trying to rush through three things at once—haste makes waste, you know. This rhyming warning, first recorded in this exact form in 1575, was in John Ray's 1678 proverb collection, where the full text was: “Haste makes waste, and waste makes want, and want makes strife between the goodman and his wife.”

Haste makes waste

Cultural  
  1. Acting too quickly may actually slow things down.


haste makes waste Idioms  
  1. Proceeding too quickly can spoil an enterprise, as in Stop trying to rush through three things at once—haste makes waste, you know. This rhyming warning, first recorded in this exact form in 1575, was in John Ray's 1678 proverb collection, where the full text was: “Haste makes waste, and waste makes want, and want makes strife between the goodman and his wife.”


Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

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As my 1st grade teacher used to say, "Haste makes waste."

From New York Times ● Mar. 29, 2018

Like all good textbooks, it furnished examples: "Haste makes waste," written in Federal Prose, became: "Precipitation entails negation of economy."

From Time Magazine Archive

His much publicized slogan, "Speed up socialist modernization," has been replaced by "Haste makes waste."

From Time Magazine Archive

For your horny-handed British working-man is apparently born with two golden aphorisms in his mouth: "Look before you leap," and "Haste makes waste."

From The Black Bag by Louis Joseph Vance

Haste makes waste, and waste makes want, and want makes strife between the   good-man and his wife.

From Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading Selected from English and American Literature by Horace Elisha Scudder

I know the pandemic upped demand but haste makes waste.

From Seattle Times ● Sep. 19, 2021

Handled right, Egypt is ‘‘going to be more like Turkey’’ than Iran, ‘‘but haste makes waste.’’

From BusinessWeek ● Feb. 4, 2011

This was Britain's Sir Hartley Shawcross, 44, a quick-witted prosecutor who had not yet learned that, at international conferences, haste makes waste, or worse.

From Time Magazine Archive

Regarding the first part of the act, let it be said that here, above all other situations in the world "haste makes waste."

From Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living Some Things That All Sane People Ought to Know About Sex Nature and Sex Functioning; Its Place in the Economy of Life, Its Proper Training and Righteous Exercise by H. W. (Harland William) Long

In the forest it is truer than elsewhere that haste makes waste, and, as materials are rare and valuable, patience is the trapper's stock in trade.

From The Wilderness Trail by Frank Williams

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