Proverbs: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 4

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StillnessPhilosophy

Still waters run deep.

The Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus, writing about Alexander the Great in the 1st century AD, recorded ‘the deepest rivers flow with the least sound’ as a proverb from Bactria, in Central Asia. Today the saying usually means that a quiet person may have deep feelings or a sharp mind. It was once a warning too: a calm surface can hide danger. The French still say there is no worse water than sleeping water, and a Turkish saying warns that a meek, downcast look can hide mischief.

English proverb; Latin origin: Altissima quaeque flumina minimo sono labunturRead card

DrivePhilosophy

The darkest hour is just before the dawn.

The earliest known version is by the English clergyman Thomas Fuller, in A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine (1650), a book on the Holy Land: ‘it is always darkest just before the day dawneth’. His example was David, whose own men were ready to stone him shortly before he was proclaimed king. The worst trouble, Fuller meant, often comes just before relief. As astronomy it is not quite right: the night is darkest around its middle, and the sky begins to pale an hour or more before sunrise.

English proverb, recorded by Thomas Fuller (1650)Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

It is better to travel well than to arrive.

Though often credited to the Buddha, the saying appears in no Buddhist scripture. It looks like a modern reworking of a line by the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island. In ‘El Dorado’, an essay collected in Virginibus Puerisque (1881), he wrote that ‘to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour’: we are happiest while we still have something to strive for. The Buddha, by contrast, taught a path with a clear goal: freedom from suffering.

Buddhist proverb, attributed to the BuddhaRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Empty vessels make the most noise.

The image comes from everyday life: tap an empty pot or barrel and it rings loudly, while a full one gives only a dull thud. Applied to people, it means that those who know least often talk most. It was already an old saying around 1599, when a boy in Shakespeare's Henry V, watching the boastful soldier Pistol, remarks that the empty vessel makes the greatest sound. Turkish has ‘Boş başak dik durur’: an empty ear of wheat stands upright, while a full one bows its head.

English proverb (16th century)Read card

DrivePhilosophy

A problem shared is a problem halved.

The idea is old. The Roman statesman Cicero wrote that friendship makes hard times lighter by dividing and sharing them, and in his essay ‘Of Friendship’ (1625) Francis Bacon said that it doubles joys and cuts griefs in half. German has a twin, ‘geteiltes Leid ist halbes Leid’: shared sorrow is half sorrow. Turkish says that whoever keeps their trouble to themselves will find no cure for it. In a 2008 study led by the psychologist Simone Schnall, people judged a hill less steep when a friend stood beside them.

English proverbRead card

DrivePhilosophy

A stumble may prevent a fall.

This English proverb is recorded in the physician Thomas Fuller's collection Gnomologia (1732), and a 1643 political declaration had already said that whoever stumbles without falling gains ground rather than losing it. The idea is simple: a small slip, like catching your foot on a loose step, is a warning that comes while there is still time to act. Safety engineers work the same way with 'near misses', studying small incidents that caused no harm in order to prevent serious accidents.

English ProverbRead card

StillnessMind

A watched pot never boils.

Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1785 that 'a watched pot is slow to boil' and credited it to his Poor Richard, though it appears in none of the almanacs. The familiar wording is in Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Mary Barton (1848). The water boils just as fast either way; what changes is how long the wait feels. Psychologists Delwin Cahoon and Ed Edmonds tested it in 1980: people asked to watch a pot and say when it boiled judged a four-minute interval as longer than people given no such task.

English ProverbRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Do not cross the bridge until you come to it.

The saying first appears in print in January 1849, in the New York newspaper The Independent. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow noted it in his journal a year later and used it in The Golden Legend (1851), calling it an old proverb. Its advice is to deal with problems when they arrive rather than living through every possible trouble in advance. Turkish says the same with 'Dereyi görmeden paçaları sıvama': do not roll up your trousers before you see the stream.

English ProverbRead card

WonderPhilosophy

When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.

This East African proverb is best known in Swahili, 'Wapiganapo tembo nyasi huumia', and similar versions exist in Gikuyu and other languages of Kenya and Tanzania. Tanzania's first president, Julius Nyerere, used it to describe the Cold War, when rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union was fought out at Africa's expense. It is still quoted whenever powerful sides clash, because those caught in the middle, not the fighters, usually pay the price.

African ProverbRead card

StillnessMind

The axe forgets; the tree remembers.

This proverb comes from the Shona people of Zimbabwe. The linguist G. Fortune of the University of Cape Town recorded it in his 1955 grammar of the Shona language, where the one that does not forget is the tree stump. The poet Maya Angelou used the short form 'The ax forgets. The tree remembers.' in a 1997 essay collection, which helped spread it in English. It describes the two sides of harm: the one who strikes can forget quickly, while the one who was hurt carries the mark for years.

African ProverbRead card

WonderMind

You cannot wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

This saying is often labelled Native American or Navajo, but its recorded history points elsewhere. A close version appeared in a Calcutta newspaper in 1888, and Mahatma Gandhi used it in 1928; collectors later found similar proverbs among the Yoruba of Nigeria, the Oromo of Ethiopia and in Somalia. The Navajo label appears only in the 1990s. Its logic travels well: a sleeper wakes when called, but someone who is pretending has chosen not to hear, and more noise will not change that.

Native American, widely attributed ProverbRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

The saying is usually called a Zen proverb. Zen is the Japanese name for Chan, a school of Buddhism that began in China and teaches that insight is found in everyday life. Its clearest root is a verse by the Chinese lay Buddhist Layman Pang (740–808), who said his miraculous powers were simply carrying water and fetching firewood. The before-and-after form spread much later, through modern books on Zen. Its point: enlightenment does not lift anyone above daily chores; it changes the attention they are done with.

Zen ProverbRead card

WonderLanguage

The palest ink is better than the best memory.

This line is often called an ancient Chinese proverb and sometimes credited to Confucius, but nothing links it to him. An English version was recorded around 1900 by Arthur H. Smith, an American missionary who spent more than fifty years in China, in his collection Proverbs and Common Sayings from the Chinese. A similar Chinese saying, 好记性不如烂笔头, says that a good memory is no match for a worn-out pen. Both make the same point: a quick note outlasts a memory we feel sure of today.

Chinese ProverbRead card

WonderPhilosophy

A single conversation with a wise person is worth ten years of study.

The saying is recorded in the Zengguang Xianwen, a collection of maxims put together in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and long used to teach children in China. There the line says that one conversation with a wise person is worth more than ten years of reading books. It is still a common compliment in Chinese after a helpful talk. A book gives every reader the same answer; a wise person can listen to one particular situation and ask the question nobody had thought of.

Chinese ProverbRead card

DrivePhilosophy

With patience, the sour grape becomes halva and the mulberry leaf satin.

This Turkish proverb joins two slow transformations. Koruk is the sour, unripe grape; given time on the vine it ripens and turns sweet, and helva, a traditional sweet, stands for that sweetness. Atlas is a glossy satin woven from silk, and silk comes from the cocoons of silkworms fed on mulberry leaves. In both images something unpromising becomes precious, but only with time. A similar line circulates in English as a Chinese proverb: with time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown.

Traditional Turkish proverb: 'Sabırla koruk helva olur, dut yaprağı atlas'Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

However far the stream flows, it never forgets its source.

This saying is widely quoted as a proverb of the Yoruba, a people of West Africa who live mostly in south-western Nigeria as well as in Benin and Togo, though, like most oral proverbs, it has no single written source. Rivers matter in Yoruba culture: the Osun River is identified with the goddess Osun, and her sacred grove at Osogbo is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The proverb asks people who travel far or rise high to stay loyal to the family and place that raised them.

Yoruba ProverbRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.

The proverb is the Irish-language saying 'Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine'. Its key word, scáth, can mean both shadow and shelter, so it says that people live in each other's shadow and under each other's protection. It fits the old Irish custom of the meitheal, in which neighbours gathered to bring in each other's harvests. The Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama took the title of his 2015 book In the Shelter from this proverb.

Irish ProverbRead card

WonderReligion & Belief

'Where there is no vision, the people perish' is the King James wording of Proverbs 29:18; here 'vision' means prophetic revelation, not a strategic plan.

Modern translations usually say 'revelation' or 'prophetic vision' instead of 'vision', and 'cast off restraint' instead of 'perish'. The Hebrew word, chazon, is the one the Bible uses for a prophet's vision, as in the first verse of the Book of Isaiah. The verse ends 'but he that keepeth the law, happy is he', so its subject is God's word and obedience to it. The Book of Proverbs is a collection of wise sayings traditionally linked to King Solomon. As a business slogan, it loses that meaning.

Biblical ProverbRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Per aspera ad astra.

The motto means 'through hardships to the stars'. No Roman author wrote it in exactly this form; it grew from older lines. Virgil's Aeneid (1st century BC) has 'sic itur ad astra', 'this is the way to the stars', and Seneca's tragedy Hercules Furens says there is no easy road from the earth to the stars. Today the phrase and its variants are the mottoes of schools, air forces and the U.S. state of Kansas, whose version reverses the order: 'Ad astra per aspera'.

Latin ProverbRead card

DriveProverbs

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost.

The chain of small losses is centuries old. A German verse from around 1230 says a nail keeps a shoe, a shoe a horse, a horse a man and a man a castle. The poet George Herbert printed an English version close to this one in 1640, and Benjamin Franklin stretched it to a lost kingdom in Poor Richard's Almanack in 1758. The lesson is about upkeep: a small, neglected detail can bring down something large.

Traditional proverbRead card

StillnessProverbs

Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow.

In Swedish: 'Delad glädje är dubbel glädje, delad sorg är halv sorg.' The idea is old: in his dialogue On Friendship (44 BC), the Roman statesman Cicero wrote that friendship makes good fortune brighter and lightens misfortune by dividing and sharing it. German has the same pair, 'Geteilte Freude ist doppelte Freude, geteiltes Leid ist halbes Leid', and many other languages have their own version.

Swedish ProverbRead card

DriveProverbs

Who risks nothing gains nothing.

In Portuguese: 'Quem não arrisca não petisca', literally 'whoever doesn't risk doesn't get a nibble'. The rhyme of arrisca and petisca makes it light and easy to remember, which the English loses. The same idea runs through many languages: English says 'nothing ventured, nothing gained', French 'qui ne risque rien n'a rien', and Latin had 'fortune favours the bold'.

Portuguese ProverbRead card

StillnessProverbs

What's meant for you won't pass you by.

In Scots: 'Whit's fur ye'll no go by ye.' It is said as comfort after a setback, when a job, a house or a romance falls through: if something was truly meant for you, it will come round again. It is less a claim about how fate works than a way to stop gripping what you cannot control. Arabic has a similar word, maktub, 'it is written'.

Scottish ProverbRead card

DriveProverbs

Go gently and you'll go safely and far.

In Italian: 'Chi va piano, va sano e va lontano', 'whoever goes slowly goes safely and goes far'. It echoes the old Latin motto festina lente, 'make haste slowly'; the Roman historian Suetonius says the emperor Augustus often repeated it, in Greek. The Venetian printer Aldus Manutius later used it with his dolphin-and-anchor emblem. Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the hare makes the same point.

Italian ProverbRead card