Quotes about proverbs

Proverbs are mental gems gathered in the diamond fields of the mind.

— William R. Alger

The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.

— Francis Bacon

Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until you've watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you.

— Nicholson Baker

How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism.

— Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.

— Thomas Carlyle

Proverbs are short sentences drawn from long experience.

— Miguel De Cervantes

A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.

— Miguel De Cervantes

I believe there's no proverb but what is true; they are all so many sentences and maxims drawn from experience, the universal mother of sciences.

— Miguel De Cervantes

I do not say a proverb is amiss when aptly and reasonably applied, but to be forever discharging them, right or wrong, hit or miss, renders conversation insipid and vulgar.

— Miguel De Cervantes

What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious: the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere, from Oregon apple valley to boreal New England, that we do not know whether to be temperate orchards or sterile climate.

— Edward Dahlberg

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings -- they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race and the man who orders his life according to their teaching cannot go far wrong.

— Norman Douglas

For proverbs are the pith, the proprieties, the proofs, the purities, the elegancies, as the commonest so the commendablest phrases of a language. To use them is a grace, to understand them a good.

— John Florio

A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

A collections of anecdotes and maxims is the greatest of treasures for the man of the world, for he knows how to intersperse conversation with the former in fit places, and to recollect the latter on proper occasions.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Don't you go believing in sayings, Picotee: they are all made by men, for their own advantages. Women who use public proverbs as a guide through events are those who have not ingenuity enough to make private ones as each event occurs.

— Thomas Hardy

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

— Aldous Huxley

He may justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind, who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind.

— Samuel Johnson

They are like the clue in the labyrinth, or the compass in the night.

— Joseph Joubert

A proverb is not a proverb to you until life has illustrated it.

— John Keats

Maxims and aphorisms, let us remember that wisdom is the true salt of literature, and the books that are most nourishing are richly stored with it, and that is the main object to seek in reading books.

— John Morely

A proverb is good sense brought to a point.

— John Morley

A proverb is the child of experience.

— English Proverb

A country can be judged by the quality of its proverbs.

— German Proverb

A proverb is one man's wit and all men's wisdom.

— John Russell

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

— George Santayana

Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones on hand do more to produce a happy life than the volumes we can't find.

— Seneca

The proverb is something musty.

— William Shakespeare

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

— Susan Sontag

A short saying often contains much wisdom.

— Sophocles

I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.

— Wallace Stevens

Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

— Chinese Proverb