I believe there's no proverb but what is true; they are all so many sentences and maxims drawn from experience, the universal moth...er of sciences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But such is life, the silliest proverbs prove to be true, and when a man thinks, now it's all right, it's not all right by a long ...shot. Man proposes, God disposes, and there's always that last straw to break the camel's back.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appe...arances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For proverbs are the pith, the proprieties, the proofs, the purities, the elegancies, as the commonest so the commendablest phrase...s of a language. To use them is a grace, to understand them a good.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »