Ten People, Ten Colors

十人十色 (jūnin toiro): ten people, ten colors. Every person has their own tastes and their own mind, and the proverb says so without judging it. It is an Edo saying with no author, first found in an 1854 kabuki digest and in a novel of the pleasure quarter, and it descends from a saying of 1638 about ten people from ten provinces on one ferry. When the Meiji dictionaries had to put it in English they reached for Terence, so many men, so many minds; the colors are the picture every English proverb of minds and tastes lacks.