Proverbial Wisdom Quotes

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

Proverb

Roses grow on thorns and honey wears a sting.

Isaac Watts

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

An epigram is a flashlight of a truth; a witticism, truth laughing at itself.

Minna Antrim

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

William R. Alger

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

He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close, and rendering it portable.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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 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

A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.

Richard Buckminster Fuller

He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone.

Oscar Wilde

In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks: and those to whom they are spoken should be big and tall of stature.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of eternity; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book -- what everyone else does not say in a book.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Treachery darkens the chain of friendship, but truth makes it brighter than ever.

American Indian Proverb, Conesto

If a man is as wise as a serpent, he can afford to be as harmless as a dove.

American Indian Proverb, Cheyenn

All who have died are equal.

American Indian Proverb, Comanch

It is good to tell one's heart.

American Indian Proverb, Chippew

Never sit while your seniors stand.

American Indian Proverb, Cree

Our pleasures are shallow, our sorrows are deep.

American Indian Proverb, Cheyenn