The article is devoted to a comparative linguistic and cultural analysis of semantic equivalents for the Russian proverb Без труда не вытащишь и рыбку из пруда (literally: Without effort, you can not pull the fish out of the pond) based on the Russian, Polish, German, English, French, Latvian, Lithuanian, Finnish, Bashkir, Tatar, Turkish, Khmer, Mongolian and Tajik proverbs.