If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he lucky?

Stanisław Jerzy Lec (1909–1966), the Polish poet and satirist, is best known for his razor-edged aphorisms—often paradoxical questions that expose the fragility of “common sense” and social clichés. This line fits the mode of his postwar epigrammatic writing, in which he repeatedly probes how much of what people call fate, luck, or success depends on perception and interpretation rather than objective events. The image of a four-leaf clover draws on a widely recognized European folk symbol of good fortune, while the twist—an inability to count—turns the superstition into a problem of knowledge and recognition.

The aphorism asks whether “luck” exists independently of awareness. A four-leaf clover is only a lucky sign if it is recognized as rare; if someone cannot count, the supposed talisman may be indistinguishable from an ordinary clover. Lec thus suggests that fortune is partly cognitive and cultural: benefits may be real, but their meaning—and even their existence as “luck”—depends on the observer’s capacity to notice, compare, and interpret. The question also satirizes superstition and the human hunger for omens, implying that what people celebrate as luck can be an after-the-fact narrative rather than a measurable condition.