Why do we say "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink"?

Meaning:

(... also seen as "can't make it drink" or "can't make them drink.") You can try to help someone, but you can’t force them to accept your assistance.

Background:

“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink” is considered a proverb, which according to Grammerly.com is “a short, pithy statement that usually offers life advice, wisdom, or a truth.” They’re so ancient and so common in the English language that people may use them in conversation without realizing they’re proverbs. Fun fact from the same source:

[S]ome of the earliest recorded proverbs date back to the ancient Sumerians in 2000 BCE. According to archaeological studies, nearly 700 tablets containing more than 1,000 proverbs written by Sumerian scribes were discovered by researchers. When translated, the researchers were surprised at how easy it was to understand these snippets of Sumerian wisdom, showing how proverbs reach across cultures and time.

Idioms are often mistaken for proverbs and vice versa. The key difference is that idioms create an image by stringing together phrases that don’t make sense out of context (e.g., “It’s raining cats and dogs”), while proverbs have a literal meaning.

Phrases.org.uk claims that “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink” is likely the oldest English proverb still in common use today. There are two others that are older, but neither originated in the English language: “When the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch,” from the Bible (Matthew 15:14) c. 80 CE, appearing in English in the late 9th century; and “A friend in need is a friend indeed” first used in the writings of the Greek philosopher Quintus Ennius (c. 239 – c. 169 BCE), which didn’t make it into the English language until at least the 11th century.

“You can lead a horse to water…” can be employed in many circumstances, but it was likely first cited to buoy up those encountering resistance while spreading Christian teachings (i.e., one can preach to another person, but they can’t force that individual to accept their message). This is borne out by the fact that it was first recorded in a 12th century book, Old English Homilies, a collection of discourses intended for spiritual reflection and teaching. The anonymous author wrote:

Hwa is thet mei thet hors wettrien the him self nule drinken (Translation: Who can give water to the horse that will not drink of its own accord?)

The phrase has been in continuous use since and was listed in John Heywood’s compilation of proverbs from 1546. His version reads, “A man maie well bring a horse to the water, But he can not make him drinke without he will.”

The saying is so ubiquitous that there’s no list on the internet of popular culture references; it appears far too often in film, TV and literature for its use to have been noted. A variation of it has made the rounds, though, as part of a series of jokes extolling Chuck Norris’s toughness (e.g., “When Chuck Norris slices onions, the onions cry.”) In this version, “Chuck Norris can lead a horse to water AND make it drink.” (OK, well, I thought it was funny…).

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