# The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs

_Aesop_ · 1 min read · ages 4-9

A man and his wife keep a goose that lays a single golden egg every morning, and they carry it to market and grow richer with each new day. Impatient for the whole fortune at once, they cut the goose open, find no gold inside her, and are left with no golden egg the next morning or ever again.

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Once there was a man and his wife who kept a goose unlike any other. Every morning she laid a single golden egg, and every morning they carried it to market and came home richer than they had gone.

For a while that was enough. Then the man began to count how many mornings it would take to grow truly rich, and the counting left him restless.

“If she lays gold,” he said one evening, “then she must be full of gold.”

His wife thought the same. Why wait for one egg a day, when the whole treasure was surely lying inside the goose already?

So the next morning they did not take the egg to market. They cut the goose open instead. And when it was done and they looked, there was no gold in her at all. She was just like any other goose.

The fortune they wanted all at once never came. And no golden egg came the morning after, nor any morning ever again.

**Moral:** Greed that cannot wait destroys the thing it was living on.

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- Read online: https://talerie.com/en/tales/the-goose-that-laid-the-golden-eggs
- Source: Aesop's Fables: a new translation, tr. V. S. Vernon Jones (1912) (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11339)
- Public-domain basis: Talerie contemporary retelling (CC0 2026), based on: Aesop's Fables: a new translation, tr. V. S. Vernon Jones (1912) — translation: author died 564 BC (+70 passed); translator V. S. Vernon Jones died 1955 (+70 passed)
- License: CC0-1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)