Maxims, Proverbs and Sayings
Maxims, Proverbs and Sayings
- Browsing through a book of proverb … it’s like taking a turn in a garden … full of roses and fruit, where the bushes speak to you; and I come back rested, with smiles in my mind —Anatole France
- Figures of speech are risky; for in art, as in arithmetic, many have no head for figures —G. K. Chesterton
- Genuine proverbs are like good (kambrick) needles, short, sharp, and shiny —Josh Billings
The first word was originally in Billings’ phonetic dialect: ‘ginowine.’
- His sayings are generally like women’s letters; all the pith is in the postscript —William Hazlitt
The man with the pith in his postscripts was Charles Lamb.
- Like many cliches, it has the ring of truth —Anon
- A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that eye placed in the back of his head —Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Maxims are like lawyers who must needs see but one side of the case —Gelett Burgess
- Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions —Ralph Waldo Emerson
- A proverb without wisdom is like a body without a foot —Moses Ibn Ezra
- Rustic sayings which she threw, like flowers, into the conversation —Anatole France
- A saying is like a fruit; one has first to eat it … before one can know its taste —Sholem Asch
- Sayings by wise men … they are like burning glasses, as they collect the diffused rays of wit and learning in authors, and make them point with warmth and quickness on the reader’s imagination —Jonathan Swift
- Sayings by wise men … they are of great value, like the dust of gold, or the sparks of diamonds —John Tillotson
- Similes are like songs on love: they much describe; they nothing prove —Matthew Prior
- Similes dangle like baubles from me —William H. Gass
- A word [that’s been overused] … lost its identity like an old coat in a second-hand shop —Anaĩs Nin