reap what one sows
Formsreaps what one sows, reaping what one sows, reaped what one sowed, reaped what one has sown
- 1To receive a return or reward that matches one's own efforts or intentions, good or bad, in short, to get the justice one deserves.
Companies that treat their workers badly will reap what they sow when their best people walk out the door.
After twenty years of patient, unglamorous research, the lab reaped what it had sown when its vaccine passed every trial.
Note
Behind the idiom is a harvest made into a moral law: Galatians 6:7 in the King James Bible, “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” In use, one gives way to the subject's own pronoun, as in Tony Blair's “we will reap what we sow” (The Guardian, 2005), and both verbs move together through the tenses: they reaped what they sowed, or what they had sown.
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Origin
The phrase comes from Galatians 6:7 in the King James Version of the Bible: “Be not deceived, God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”