Proverb
42 entries
About
Folk sayings are short, memorable sentences that pass from mouth to mouth and from generation to generation, and whose first author nobody knows. They grew out of everyday life: work in the fields and at the forge, the family, the market, the weather and the seasons. In a few words they hold the experience of many lives, often in a picture that is easy to remember, with a rhyme, a rhythm or a twist at the end. Most were written down only when scholars began to collect them; one of the first collections of English proverbs was published by John Heywood in 1546.
The same thought often lives in many languages, each with a picture of its own: where English will not count its chickens before they hatch, Serbian will not make the spit while the hare is still in the forest. That is why the sayings here stand in each language as that language says them, and not as word-for-word translations.
- Sayings 42