Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Proverbial Wisdom.
They are the guiding oracles which man has found out for himself in that great business of ours, of learning how to be, to do, to do without, and to depart.
John Morley
A proverb is good sense brought to a point.
There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.
Thomas Carlyle
A proverb is one man's wit and all men's wisdom.
John Russell
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
Vladimir Nabokov
What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.
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 George BulwerLytton
All maxims have their antagonist maxims; proverbs should be sold in pairs, a single one being but a half truth.
William Mathews
You cannot eat your cake and have it.
James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
Susan Sontag
It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
Aldous Huxley
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
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 (Seneca the Elder)
Maxims are the condensed good sense of nations.
James Mackintosh
The Republicans stroke platitudes until they purr like epigrams.
Adlai Stevenson
In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.
George Eliot
Most maxim-mongers have preferred the prettiness to the justness of a thought, and the turn to the truth; but I have refused myself to everything that my own experience did not justify and confirm.
Lord Chesterfield
