A hare always ridicules a slow-moving tortoise. In response, the tortoise challenges his swift mocker to a race. The hare soon leaves the tortoise far behind and, confident of winning, he decides to take a nap midway through the course. When he awakes, however, he finds that his competitor, crawling slowly but steadily, has already won the race.

The moral, stated at the end of the story, is “Slow and steady wins the race”.

I can never co-relate the story and the given moral. In my opinion, the moral of the story should be “It is not good to become overconfident” or something like this. If the hare had not been overconfident of himself, he would easily have won the race. Then we could also say that “Fast but steady always win”.

I can’t think of any interpretation of the story which will give me the moral as “Slow and steady wins the race”.

Just a thought:

The tortoise challenged the hare to a race even though he knew that he was much slower than the hare. This means that the tortoise believed that he would win the race. Was it because tortoise knew that the hare was very overconfident or the he had put some sleeping pills in hare’s food before the race?