C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Proverbs
The abridgments of wisdom.
Infinite riches in a little room.
Have at you with a proverb.
Sense, shortness, and salt.
For I am proverbed with a grandsire phrase.
Short sentences drawn from a long experience.
Patch grief with proverbs.
Proverbs embody the current and practical philosophy of an age or nation.
Proverbs are for the most part rules of moral, or, still more properly, of prudential conduct.
The wisdom of the wise and the experience of ages.
The proverbs of a nation, furnish the index to its spirit, and the results of its civilization.
Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions.
The genius, wit, and spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.
Proverbs were bright shafts in the Greek and Latin quivers.
The wit of one man, and the wisdom of many.
Proverbs are mental gems gathered in the diamond districts of the mind.
Jewels five words long, that on the stretched forefinger of all Time sparkle forever.
If you hear a wise sentence or an apt phrase, commit it to your memory.
The study of proverbs may be more instructive and comprehensive than the most elaborate scheme of philosophy.
The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram.
The proverb answers where the sermon fails, as a well-charged pistol will do more execution than a whole barrel of gunpowder idly exploded.
Short, isolated sentences were the mode in which ancient wisdom delighted to convey its precepts for the regulation of human conduct.
I do not say a proverb is amiss when aptly and seasonably applied; but to be forever discharging them, right or wrong, hit or miss, renders conversation insipid and vulgar.
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!
Proverbs were anterior to books, and formed the wisdom of the vulgar, and in the earliest ages were the unwritten laws of morality.
The proverbial wisdom of the populace in the street, on the roads, and in the markets instructs the ear of him who studies man more fully than a thousand rules ostentatiously displayed.
Proverbs are somewhat analogous to those medical formulas which, being in frequent use, are kept ready made up in the chemists’ shops, and which often save the framing of a distinct prescription.
The Scripture vouches Solomon for the wisest of men; and they are his proverbs that prove him so. The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all that fame each of them by a single sentence consisting of two or three words.
We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because for a time they are not remembered; he may, therefore, 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.