Ìwà lẹwà.
Character as the ground of a person
Original
Ìwà lẹwà.
Word-for-word gloss
- Ìwà character lẹwà is-the-beauty.
Idiomatic English
"Character is beauty."
Di source no name any translator.
Wetin e mean
Beauty is a property of character, not of appearance.
When dem dey use am
Spoken to correct someone weighing a person, especially a prospective spouse, by looks. Owomoyela glosses it "A person is as beautiful as his or her character is good"
Notes on di translation
The near-rhyme of ìwà and ẹwà carries the claim phonetically and English cannot reproduce it. Because ìwà is built on wà, to exist, the sentence also reads "existence is beauty," and Yorùbá does not force a choice between the two readings the way a translation must. This is the single most-quoted Yorùbá proverb on character and it appears in almost every collection.