人为财死，鸟为食亡
rén wèi cái sǐ, niǎo wèi shí wáng
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Traditional: 人為財死，鳥為食亡
People will risk anything for money, even their lives, the way birds get killed going after food. Said as a cynical comment on greed, or as a warning against it.
Người chết vì tiền của, chim chết vì miếng ăn: lòng tham có thể khiến người ta liều cả mạng sống. Thường dùng để nhận xét chua chát, hoặc để răn về thói tham tiền.
Register: neutral
Examples
Editorial example (illustrative, not a corpus attestation) — awaiting a native-speaker check
Sources & notes
Hán-Việt bridge batch 062 (2026-11-13). Headword, Traditional form and pinyin checked against CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) source ↗ · Hán-Việt reading: Unihan kVietnamese source ↗ ; en.wiktionary Vietnamese entries via kaikki.org extract, snapshot 2026-07-31 (CC BY-SA 4.0): Hán-Việt reading 为/為 = vị, 食 = thực · Vietnamese cognate: Idiomer entry “nhơn vị tài tử, điểu vị thực vong” (nhon-vi-tai-tu-dieu-vi-thuc-vong). Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Equivalents & related
Common questions
What does “人为财死，鸟为食亡” mean?
People will risk anything for money, even their lives, the way birds get killed going after food. Said as a cynical comment on greed, or as a warning against it. Literally: man dies for money, bird dies for food
Is “人为财死，鸟为食亡” formal or informal?
人为财死，鸟为食亡 is generally neutral.