転んでもただでは起きない
(Koronde mo tada de wa okinai;
“Even falling down, they won’t get up as they were”)

Definition:

Cunning and greedy; angling to get some sort of profit even from a mistake or setback; like someone who slips and falls, then looks for something to pick up while they’re on the ground. Although it can have admiring overtones, it tends to be used as a cutting remark about someone’s greed or about their tendency to go with whatever seems the most advantageous.

Note that saying is not used of someone who profits through hard work or recognized talent; the nuance is of someone managing to enrich themselves by finding some trick, loophole, or angle.

Breakdown:

We begin with the verb 転ぶ (korobu), “to fall down,” in conjunctive form and followed by the particle も (mo). The latter often means “also,” or by extension “even,” but here the ～ても form implies emphasis: falling down is an extreme example of the kind of misfortune that the person might try to extract benefit from. This is followed by adjectival noun ただ (tada), often translated as “free” but in this case meaning something more like “as is.” This is followed by particle で (de) denoting a state, and then particle は (wa) indicating an implicit contrast: the state of the person who fell is not “as it was” by the time they 起きる (okiru), “to get up,” a verb here found in negative sentence-final form.

Notes:

This one doesn’t seem to have a standard version. You can do without the で in では, although that may be less common nowadays. Some variants use the older negative suffix ぬ (nu) instead of ない.

Example sentence:

「あの上田さん？うーん、頑張り屋さんというか転んでもただでは起きない人というか、どんな目に遭っても必ず最後は利益を出してるから、ちょっと気になる人だ」

(“Ano Ueda-san? Uun, ganbariya san to iu ka koronde mo tada de wa okinai hito to iu ka, donna me ni atte mo kanarazu saigo wa rieki wo dashiteru kara, chotto ki ni naru hito da.”)

[“Oh, that Ueda-san? Umm, well, I don’t know whether it’s because they work hard or whether they just find a way to benefit even from failure. But no matter what happens they always end up turning a profit, and it’s caught my attention.”]