What does the proverb 'Make yourself all honey and the flies will devour you'…

Concept

A proverb states a general truth through figurative imagery rather than literal fact, so understanding it requires mapping each image to what it represents about human behaviour, then reading the whole statement as a warning, observation, or piece of advice, not selecting whichever image feels positive in isolation.

Application

Here, honey stands for excessive sweetness or servility, flies stand for those who take advantage of that sweetness, and 'devour' signals being consumed or exploited rather than merely admired. Read together, the proverb is warning that behaving with excessive sweetness or submissiveness attracts people who will exploit that behaviour.

Contrast

• Treating sweetness as leading only to success and admiration ignores the negative outcome named by 'devour' and generalises with an absolute 'always' the proverb does not state.

• Recasting the saying as success drawing a following swaps out the proverb's specific sweetness-and-exploitation imagery for an unrelated idea about success.

• Treating attracted attention as uniformly beneficial overlooks that 'devour' describes a harmful consequence, not a positive one.

So the proverb's meaning is that being excessively sweet or servile invites exploitation.