The Eagle and the Arrow
Aesop's Fables · 1 min read
An eagle, soaring high above a valley, was struck suddenly by a hunter's arrow and fell wounded to the ground below, in terrible pain. As he lay there, dying, he happened to glance at the arrow embedded in his side — and saw, to his deep sorrow, that its feathered fletching was made from the very feathers of his own kind, plucked from an eagle just like himself.
"How bitter," he said with his final breath, "to be brought down not by some stranger's weapon, but by a weapon made partly from my own kind's feathers — we so often provide, without knowing it, the very means of our own destruction."
His words were remembered by the other eagles who found him, a lasting warning about how carelessly given gifts or shared secrets can, in the wrong hands, eventually be turned back against those who gave them.
Moral of the story
What we carelessly give away can, in the wrong hands, become the very thing used against us.