Erasmus’s Law
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
The Dutch scholar and theologian Desiderius Erasmus is unlikely to have been the first to make this observation but his expression of it in Adages (1545) is the earliest recorded version in A Dictionary of American Proverbs (Wolfgang Meider et. al eds. 1992).
Folk wisdom has produced many variations, among them “Grass always seems greener in foreign fields”, “Grass is always greener in somebody else’s back yard”, and “The grass may be greener across the street but watch out for the barbed wire.”
The effect of distance upon our perceptions is not limited to the greenness of grass. For example Arthur Bloch included the following two rules in The Complete Murphy’s Law (1991):
Fuller’s Law of Journalism
The farther away the disaster or accident occurs the greater the number of dead and injured required for it to become a story.
Loftus’s Theory on Personnel Recruitment
Faraway talent always seems better than home-grown talent.
Discussion of Erasmus’s Law
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