Proverbs

“His many years had reduced and polished him the way water smooths and polishes a stone or generations of men polish a proverb.”

“All the world over, proverbs run in pairs, and pull both ways: for the most part one neutralizes, by contradiction, the other.”

“Proverbs are short sentences drawn from long and wise experience.”

“[A proverb is] one man's wit, and all men's wisdom.”

“Proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”

“I can tell thee where that saying was born.”

“Scoundrel maxim.”

“Know thyself.—Solon.Suretyship is the precursor of ruin.—Thales.”

“The genius, wit, and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs.”

“Proverbs like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions.”

“Much matter decocted into few words.”

“A proverb and a byword among all people.”

“Maxims are the condensed good sense of nations.”

“This formal fool, your man, speaks naught but proverbs,Such spokes as ye ancient of ye parish use.”

“Wickedness proceedeth from the wicked.”