One day Hodja’s apprentice said, “Hodja, everyone says you’re good. Does that mean that you really are good?” Hodja replied that this was not necessarily so. The boy then asked whether if everyone said Hodja was bad, would it mean he was bad, and again Hodja replied, “not necessarily.”
When the apprentice asked how he could tell, Hodja told him that if the good people said he was good, and the bad people that he was bad, then he was good. He paused for a moment, scratching his beard, and then continued, “but you know how hard it is to tell which are the good people and which are the bad.”