This pictured quote reminded me of the “walk a mile in my shoes quote” so I ran with it. The origin of the famous proverb “before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes” was quite difficult to find, as there are many who simply rephrased and added their own “spin” to this commonly known quote. Many of those modern quotations added the sentence “… That way, you are a mile away from them and have their shoes”, which naturally adds a funny spin to the quote, but it (unfortunately) has nothing in common with the original thoughts behind the fantastic proverb.
The earliest traces of the enlightening part of the proverb date back to the Cherokee tribe of Native Americans, who said “Don’t judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes”. Nelle Harper Lee, an American authoress, was seemingly inspired by the saying of the Amerindians in her book “To Kill a Mockingbird”, where she wrote “You never really know a man until you understand things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird.1960
and thereby brought the saying to a wider public and increased its popularity distinctly.
