99 Fun Facts About Proverbs

Which word stood where 'curiosity' now sits in the cat proverb as Ben Jonson wrote it in 1598?

Care, meaning worry, killed the cat in Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour and in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing; 'curiosity' only took over in the 1800s.

'Money is the root of all evil' drops which word from 1 Timothy 6:10, which condemns 'the ___ of money'?

Love of money, not money itself, is the target, and modern translations soften even that: the New International Version makes it 'a root of all kinds of evil'. The Greek word, philargyria, is literally silver-loving.

Which bomber's manifesto gave him away partly by using 'eat your cake and have it too', the older word order?

Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, had written the reversed form in a letter to his mother, and FBI linguist James Fitzgerald's match helped name him.

Fred R. Barnard spread 'a picture is worth a thousand words' in the 1920s through a journal serving which trade?

Advertising was Barnard's business, and his 1927 ad passed the line off as a Chinese proverb, which is why it still gets pinned on Confucius; the editor Arthur Brisbane had said much the same in 1911.

Which First Lady's 1996 book took its title from the proverb 'It takes a village to raise a child'?

Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village called the line an African proverb, yet no evidence ties that exact saying to any African culture.

'An apple a day keeps the doctor away' was first recorded in 1866 as a proverb from which country?

Wales supplied the first printed version, a Pembrokeshire rhyme: 'Eat an apple on going to bed, and you'll keep the doctor from earning his bread.'

'May you live in interesting times' is billed as a curse from which country, which has no such saying?

China has no such saying. The 'curse' surfaces in a 1936 letter from the British statesman Austen Chamberlain, who said one of Britain's diplomats in China had told him of it.

Which saying, worded by Algernon Sidney in 1698, do most Americans polled place in the Bible?

God helps those who help themselves appears nowhere in the Bible, and many Christians say it runs against the book's message of grace, in which God helps the helpless. Poor Richard's Almanack spread Sidney's wording.

Which put-down was tacked onto the end of 'Jack of all trades' in the 1700s?

'Master of none' shows up in 18th-century print, while the longer 'but oftentimes better than a master of one' is a recent extension, not the 'original'.

'Trust, but verify', Ronald Reagan's refrain at every meeting with Gorbachev, is a proverb in which language?

Russian 'doveryay, no proveryay' rhymes, and the historian Suzanne Massie taught it to Reagan before the 1987 INF Treaty signing.

Which US president called 'speak softly and carry a big stick' a West African proverb, on little evidence?

Theodore Roosevelt first used the line in a January 1900 letter while governor of New York, and no record of the saying has turned up in West Africa before him, so he may well have coined it himself.

'This too shall pass', a king's motto in a tale Abraham Lincoln retold in 1859, is traced to which country's poets?

Persia's medieval Sufi poets are the likeliest origin, though Jewish folklore gives the line to King Solomon. In Edward FitzGerald's 1852 telling a sultan asks for a signet motto that holds good in adversity or prosperity.

'It ain't over till the fat lady sings' evokes Brünnhilde's long farewell in an opera cycle by which composer?

Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung ends the Ring cycle with Brünnhilde's farewell, yet the line's first known printing, in 1976, is a quip by a college sports official, Texas Tech's Ralph Carpenter.

'The nail that sticks out gets hammered down', often set against 'the squeaky wheel gets the grease', comes from where?

Japan's 'deru kugi wa utareru' warns that standing out invites criticism, while the American line, usually credited to humorist Josh Billings around 1870, promises that complaining gets you served.

'Good fences make good neighbors' is said twice by a stone-hauling neighbour in a 1914 poem by which American?

Robert Frost's 'Mending Wall' actually doubts the line: its narrator insists 'something there is that doesn't love a wall'.

'The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men' comes from a 1785 poem written after the poet ploughed up a nest, by whom?

Robert Burns's 'To a Mouse' came from turning up a nest at Mossgiel Farm, and its line later gave John Steinbeck the title Of Mice and Men.

'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread' and 'to err is human' come from a 1711 poem by which English poet?

Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism also gave us 'a little learning is a dangerous thing', which is routinely misquoted as 'a little knowledge'.

'What does not kill me makes me stronger' is maxim eight in Twilight of the Idols, by which philosopher?

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote it in 1888, the last year of his working life: in January 1889 he collapsed in a Turin street and never recovered his mind, though he lived on, nursed by his mother and then his sister, until 1900.

'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely' comes from an 1887 letter to a future bishop by whom?

Lord Acton was scolding the historian Mandell Creighton for going easy on the popes of the Inquisition: he refused to 'judge Pope and King unlike other men', adding that 'Great men are almost always bad men'.

'A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step' comes from the Tao Te Ching, credited to which sage?

Laozi's line, in chapter 64, literally says a journey of a thousand li 'starts beneath one's feet', and it is constantly pinned on Confucius instead.

'Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater' entered English in 1849 from which language, recorded there in 1512?

German 'das Kind mit dem Bade ausschütten' came with a 1512 woodcut of a woman tipping an infant out with the wash water, in Thomas Murner's Narrenbeschwörung.

'No such thing as a free lunch' mocks a 19th-century come-on by which American businesses?

Saloons salted the free food so that customers would drink more, and the price of the drinks covered it. The economist Milton Friedman took the line as a 1975 book title, but it was already decades old.

Which squire, briefly governor of the 'island' Barataria, peppers Cervantes's novel with ironic Spanish proverbs?

Sancho Panza gets his 'island' as a prank by a duke and duchess, yet he judges its disputes wisely before giving the job up.

'Every cloud has a silver lining' grew from an image in the 1634 masque Comus, by which poet?

John Milton gave the image to a Lady lost in a wood at night: she sees 'a sable cloud / Turn forth her silver lining on the night' and takes heart.

'Knowledge is power' is credited to which English philosopher, whose 1597 Latin runs 'ipsa scientia potestas est'?

Francis Bacon tucked the words into brackets in a meditation on heresies, and the knowledge he meant was God's: God's knowing, he argued, is itself a part of God's power.

In Britain's 'Red sky at night, ___ delight', whose delight is it, where Americans say sailors'?

Shepherds' delight is the British form and sailors' the American, and the forecast is old enough for Jesus to cite it in Matthew 16.

'Don't count your chickens before they hatch' is the usual moral of a fable about a daydreaming girl carrying what?

Milk fills the pail on the milkmaid's head: she pictures the eggs it will buy, the chickens, then a new gown, tosses her head at her imagined admirers and spills the lot.

Which animals 'also fall from trees' in a well-known Japanese proverb meaning that even experts slip up?

Monkeys have company: a sister proverb says even Kōbō Daishi, the monk famed for his calligraphy, made slips of the brush. English makes the same point with 'even Homer nods'.

Which word completes 'If wishes were horses, ___ would ride', found in an early collection of Scots proverbs?

Beggars would ride, but a rival version in William Camden's Remaines offered them dinner instead of transport: 'If wishes were thrushes, beggars would eat birds.'

'Remember that time is money' comes from a 1748 'Advice to a Young Tradesman' by which American polymath?

Benjamin Franklin did not coin it: the line had already run in a London newspaper, The Free-Thinker, in 1719, nearly thirty years before his essay.

'Know thyself' was carved at the temple of Apollo in which Greek sanctuary, beside the maxim 'nothing too much'?

Delphi is where, in Plato's telling, the Seven Sages met and dedicated the two sayings to Apollo as the first-fruits of their wisdom. Ancient writers never agreed which sage coined which.

'Carpe diem', literally 'pluck the day', was first urged in an ode of 23 BC by which Roman poet?

Horace was telling a woman named Leuconoe to stop asking Babylonian astrologers how long she would live: strain the wine, he says, and trust tomorrow as little as you can.

Which Hamlet character, later stabbed through a tapestry, advises his son 'neither a borrower nor a lender be'?

Polonius hands the maxims to Laertes, and Hamlet later runs him through behind an arras, mistaking his voice for Claudius's.

Which word did Shakespeare use instead of 'glitters' in The Merchant of Venice's 'All that ___ is not gold'?

'All that glisters is not gold' is the scroll the Prince of Morocco finds inside the golden casket, and Chaucer had 'Hyt is not al golde that glareth' two centuries earlier.

'Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer', AFI's 58th greatest movie quote, comes from which 1974 film?

The Godfather Part II has Michael Corleone pass it on as a lesson his father taught him. It is often pinned on the ancient general Sun Tzu, but The Art of War has no such line.

'No man is an island' and 'for whom the bell tolls' both come from 1624 prose meditations by which English poet-priest?

John Donne's Meditation XVII, from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, later handed Ernest Hemingway the title For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Which bird 'does not make a spring' in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, as a fable about a sold cloak explains?

A swallow seen on a fine early day convinces a spendthrift that the cold is over, so he sells his only coat; then a frost kills the bird and leaves him shivering. English versions changed the season to summer.

Which English author coined 'the pen is mightier than the sword' for his 1839 play Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy?

Edward Bulwer-Lytton gave the line to his cardinal. He also opened an 1830 novel with 'It was a dark and stormy night', and a contest for the worst possible opening sentence was later named after him.

'A rolling stone gathers no moss' spread through the Adagia, a proverb collection by which Dutch humanist?

Erasmus gave it in Greek and Latin, and it was a warning: a rolling stone was a drifter who would amount to nothing. The image later named a Muddy Waters song, and the song named the Rolling Stones.

Which 1782 French novel of seduction is wrongly credited with 'revenge is a dish best served cold'?

Les Liaisons dangereuses never says it. The line first shows up in English in an 1846 translation of Eugène Sue's novel Mathilde, and Star Trek II later had Khan call it a Klingon proverb.

'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned' paraphrases a couplet spoken by Zara in which 1697 play by William Congreve?

The Mourning Bride, a tragedy, was hugely popular in its day and is now among Congreve's least regarded plays. It also opens with 'Music has charms to soothe a savage breast', routinely misquoted as 'savage beast'.

'Give a man a fish, teach a man to fish' entered English in the 1885 novel Mrs. Dymond, by which Victorian writer?

Anne Thackeray Ritchie, daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, wrote that a man given a fish 'is hungry again in an hour', and her line is now usually passed off as ancient Eastern wisdom.

'The road to hell is paved with good intentions' is usually pinned on which 12th-century French abbot, rightly or not?

Bernard of Clairvaux gets the credit, probably wrongly, for 'Hell is full of good wishes or desires'; Samuel Johnson later snapped 'Sir, hell is paved with good intentions'.

Thomas Carlyle put 'speech is silver, silence is golden' into English, crediting an inscription from which country?

Switzerland is where Carlyle's 'Swiss Inscription' supposedly stood: in Sartor Resartus he quotes the inscription, then at once offers his own version, 'Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.'

In Pliny's tale behind 'let the cobbler stick to his last', which Greek painter rebuked a shoemaker who faulted a leg?

Apelles hid behind his pictures to hear comments; the cobbler rightly faulted a sandal strap, then overreached, and English got the word 'ultracrepidarian'.

'Manners maketh man' is the motto of Winchester College and New College, Oxford, both founded by which medieval bishop?

William of Wykeham rose by running Edward III's building works at Windsor Castle, became Bishop of Winchester and twice Chancellor of England, and founded the school to feed pupils to his Oxford college.

Thomas More first used 'out of the frying pan into the fire' in 1532 while attacking which Bible translator?

William Tyndale was the adversary More said had 'conveyed himself out of the frying pan fair into the fire'. Neither escaped it: More was beheaded in 1535, and Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake a year later.

'A healthy mind in a healthy body' comes from a satire listing what a Roman should pray for, by which poet?

Juvenal's Satire X supplied 'mens sana in corpore sano', and the sportswear firm ASICS is an acronym of the variant 'anima sana in corpore sano'.

Sophocles' 'no one loves the messenger who brings bad news', a forerunner of 'don't shoot the messenger', is in which play?

Antigone gives the line to a guard who lost the draw of lots to tell King Creon the body has been buried. Plutarch tells of an Armenian king who beheaded the first messenger to report a Roman army's approach.

The Latin saying 'pecunia non olet' (money does not stink) defends Emperor Vespasian's tax on which substance?

Urine collected from Rome's public urinals was sold as a chemical ingredient, and Vespasian taxed it. When his son Titus complained, he held up a gold coin and asked if it smelled.

Which New York skyscraper, struck about 23 times a year, disproves the saying that lightning never strikes twice?

The Empire State Building is hit by lightning an average of 23 times a year. Tall, pointy, isolated objects are struck again and again, so the old saying is simply false.

Which 1980 horror film made the 1659 proverb 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy' popular again?

The Shining shows a manuscript made of nothing but that proverb, repeated endlessly. Stanley Kubrick shot separate takes of the pages in other languages for the foreign releases.

Which actress turned the proverb 'No pain, no gain' into an exercise motto with her aerobics videos from 1982?

Jane Fonda made it her workout catchphrase, urging viewers past the point of muscle ache. The proverb is far older: Samuel Smiles listed 'No pains no gains' in Self-Help in 1859.

'Don't look a gift horse in the mouth', a proverb St Jerome knew around AD 400, refers to checking a horse's what?

Teeth reveal a horse's age and value, so inspecting them questions the worth of a present. St Jerome was already calling the line a 'common proverb' around AD 400.

Which king of Israel, a son of David, is traditionally credited with writing most of the biblical Book of Proverbs?

Solomon is named in the book's opening line, yet it was plainly built up over time. One section says its sayings were copied out by the officials of a later king of Judah.

Which adage is named after an engineer who worked on US Air Force rocket-sled tests in the late 1940s?

Murphy's law, that anything that can go wrong will, is named after the engineer Edward Murphy. Project head John Stapp made it famous by citing it at a press conference.

Which animal in Aesop's fable decides the grapes it cannot reach are sour, giving English the phrase 'sour grapes'?

A fox leaps for grapes high on a vine, fails, and walks off scorning them. In the Scandinavian version the fruit is rowanberries, since grapes are scarce that far north.

Julius Caesar reportedly said 'the die is cast' in 49 BC as his army crossed which river into Italy?

The Rubicon marked the southern edge of Caesar's province, so marching troops over it meant civil war. 'Crossing the Rubicon' still means passing a point of no return.

Which Greek philosopher reportedly declared at his trial for impiety that 'the unexamined life is not worth living'?

Socrates supposedly said it after choosing death over exile, having been tried for impiety and corrupting the young. The line survives because his pupil Plato wrote the defence speech down.

Which Shakespeare tragedy has a queen tell her guilt-ridden husband 'what's done is done', an early use of the saying?

Macbeth has Lady Macbeth say it in Act 3, and the thought returns in her sleepwalking scene. Shakespeare did not coin it: a French proverb of the early 1300s says much the same.

In the Sermon on the Mount, which treasure should never be cast before swine, a warning against wasting things of value?

Pearls are paired in Matthew 7:6 with a ban on giving dogs what is holy. Both animals were poorly regarded at the time, and the dogs in question were half-wild packs.

Which insect does the Book of Proverbs tell the 'sluggard' to go and watch for a lesson in hard work?

The ant has no overseer or ruler, the passage notes, yet stores its food in summer. The sluggard, meanwhile, is mocked for wanting a little more sleep and folding of the hands.

In a legal maxim set down by the English jurist Sir Edward Coke in 1628, a man's house is his what?

Castle was Coke's word in his Institutes of the Laws of England. The maxim lives on in 'castle doctrine' laws, mostly American, that permit force against an intruder at home.

Pliny the Elder reportedly said 'fortune favours the brave' while sailing his fleet toward which erupting volcano?

Vesuvius killed him: Pliny the Elder steered toward the eruption of AD 79 hoping to rescue a friend, and died on the expedition. His nephew recorded the remark.

Which US state put 'United we stand, divided we fall' on its seal in 1792 and keeps it as the state motto?

Kentucky adopted it for the state seal in 1792. The line is often traced to Aesop's fable of four oxen, safe from a lion until they quarrelled and went their separate ways.

Which 4th-century bishop of Milan is credited with 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do', advice about Saturday fasting?

Saint Ambrose gave the advice to Augustine, whose mother Monica was troubled that Milan's church did not fast on Saturdays. He said he fasted in Rome but not at home in Milan.

In the Latin legal maxim 'caveat emptor', which party to a sale is warned to beware of hidden defects?

The buyer typically knows less about the goods than the person selling them, so the old rule left the risk with the purchaser. Warranties were the usual answer to that imbalance.

The Latin adage 'si vis pacem, para bellum', origin of the Parabellum cartridge's name, says to prepare for what?

War is the 'bellum' of the adage: if you want peace, prepare for it. The wording adapts a line by the Roman military writer Vegetius, and an arms maker later took it as a motto.

Which self-help author spread the advice to turn a lemon into lemonade in How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948)?

Dale Carnegie gets the credit, but Elbert Hubbard beat him into print. Hubbard used the lemons image in a 1915 obituary praising the upbeat actor Marshall P. Wilder.

Which dish do too many cooks spoil, in a proverb Jane Austen quoted in her unfinished novel The Watsons?

The broth suffers when everyone stirs: a task with too many people in charge is done badly. Austen's character cites the proverb to justify keeping her own counsel.

'An eye for an eye' is the principle behind laws 196 and 200 in the code of which Babylonian king?

Hammurabi's code prescribes an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth when one man destroys another's. Under the same principle a punishment could even pass to the wrongdoer's sons.

Which Flemish painter packed about 126 literal illustrations of sayings into the 1559 panel Netherlandish Proverbs?

Pieter Bruegel filled a village with people acting out sayings such as banging one's head against a brick wall. His son later painted at least 16 copies of the scene.

Which Shakespeare character feigns death in battle in Henry IV, then claims discretion is the better part of valour?

Falstaff drops to the ground to dodge an attack by Douglas, then defends himself with the line. His actual words run the other way round: the better part of valour is discretion.

Which English poet coined 'ignorance is bliss' in a 1742 ode on a distant view of his old school, Eton College?

Thomas Gray coined it in the ode's closing lines. His full thought is conditional: where ignorance is bliss, it is folly to be wise.

Which Spanish-born philosopher wrote in 1905 that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it?

George Santayana put the line in Reason in Common Sense, the first volume of The Life of Reason. It now appears on a plaque at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Which 1955 courtroom play about the Scopes evolution trial takes its title from Proverbs 11:29?

Inherit the Wind borrows the verse's warning about anyone who troubles his own house. The play retold the 1925 trial as a way to discuss the McCarthy hearings of its own day.

Which Greek philosopher of Ephesus, who taught that everything flows, said no one steps in the same river twice?

Heraclitus used the river to show a world in constant change. His cryptic, riddling epigrams earned him the ancient nickname 'the Obscure'.

Which Romantic poet's comic epic Don Juan supplied the thought behind 'truth is stranger than fiction'?

Lord Byron wrote in canto XIV that truth is always strange, stranger than fiction. He died in 1824 with 16 cantos complete and a seventeenth unfinished.

Which Victorian novelist had Mr Tulliver judge a book by its fine binding in The Mill on the Floss (1860)?

George Eliot has him admire a beautifully bound copy of Defoe's History of the Devil. A 1946 murder mystery, Murder in the Glass Room, later put the saying in terms of a book's cover.

The Book of Proverbs ends by praising a virtuous woman whose price is 'far above' which gems in the King James Version?

Rubies set the price in Proverbs 31:10. The poem it opens is an alphabetical acrostic, each line starting with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

The final chapter of the Book of Proverbs opens with advice that King Lemuel was taught by whom?

His mother, an unnamed queen, warns Lemuel against drunkenness and promiscuity. She tells him to speak up for the poor and judge fairly.

Which Old Testament prophet asked whether a leopard can change its spots, alongside an Ethiopian changing his skin?

Jeremiah used both images against Judah: people so accustomed to doing evil, he said, could no more start doing good than the animal could shed its markings.

Which Old Testament book gave English 'nothing new under the sun' and 'eat, drink and be merry'?

Ecclesiastes also supplied 'vanity of vanities' and 'a time to be born and a time to die'. Its speaker is called Kohelet, usually rendered the Teacher or the Preacher.

'Beware of Greeks bearing gifts' paraphrases a Trojan priest's warning about a wooden horse in which Latin epic?

The Aeneid gives the warning to Laocoön, who then hurls a spear into the horse's side. Virgil has a groan sound from its hollow belly, yet the Trojans still haul the horse into their city.

British weather lore says rain on which saint's day, 15 July, means forty more days of rain?

St Swithin, a 9th-century bishop, is said to have asked on his deathbed for an outdoor grave where rain could fall on it. His body was moved inside a new basilica on 15 July 971.

Which medieval poet's Troilus and Criseyde is often considered the origin of 'all good things must come to an end'?

Geoffrey Chaucer retold the tragic story of two lovers during the siege of Troy. The line about good things ending comes in the third of the poem's five books.

Mark Twain credited 'lies, damned lies, and statistics' to which British prime minister, whose works never contain it?

Benjamin Disraeli got the credit in Twain's 1907 autobiography, yet the earliest known appearances of the phrase came years after his death, in British newspapers of 1891.

Which British author's 1911 poem argued that 'the female of the species is more deadly than the male'?

Rudyard Kipling opened with she-bears and cobras as proof, but his real target was votes for women. The poem was an anti-suffrage polemic, first printed in The Morning Post.

Which 1878 novel by the Irish writer Margaret Wolfe Hungerford contains 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder'?

Molly Bawn, the story of a frivolous, petulant Irish girl, was Hungerford's best-known book. Both the novel and its author get a mention in James Joyce's Ulysses.

A 'Wellerism', a saying twisted by a comic speaker, is named after Sam Weller in which Charles Dickens novel?

The Pickwick Papers gave Sam Weller his habit of quoting a stock phrase and then pinning it on an unlikely speaker. Wellerisms mock proverbs by taking them literally.

Which Tudor playwright published a 1546 collection claiming to hold 'all the proverbs in the English tongue'?

John Heywood wove the sayings into a dialogue about two kinds of marriage. A devout Catholic, he still served at the courts of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I.

Parkinson's law, that work expands to fill the time available, first appeared in a 1955 essay in which British weekly?

The Economist ran C. Northcote Parkinson's essay after a royal commission reported on the civil service. He reprinted it in a successful 1958 book of similar essays.

Which Roman emperor, who deplored rash generals, had 'festina lente' (make haste slowly) as a favourite saying?

Augustus thought nothing suited a commander less than rashness. Gold coins minted for him paired a crab with a butterfly as an emblem of the adage.

Which term, from the Greek word for a proverb or maxim, names the collection and study of proverbs?

Paremiology comes from the Greek 'paroimia'. From the 1960s its scholars turned ethnographic, recording how sayings are actually used in conversation.

Which English poet's Olney hymn of 1773 gave the language 'God moves in a mysterious way'?

William Cowper wrote it as a poem titled 'Light Shining out of Darkness'. His friend John Newton printed it the next year, and the two later included it in their Olney Hymns.

Which American inventor, who resented being called a genius, said genius was 99 percent perspiration?

Thomas Edison grew to resent titles that cast him as a genius and stressed hard work instead. Newspapers were already crediting him with the remark by 1901.

What should be made 'while the sun shines', in a Tudor farming proverb attested since 1546?

Hay has to be cut, dried and gathered in dry weather, a gamble for farmers before forecasts existed. The proverb has been used figuratively since 1673.

'Physician, heal thyself', which Jesus himself calls a proverb, appears in the fourth chapter of which Gospel?

Luke has Jesus quote it as a proverb his listeners will surely throw at him. The Latin Bible later spread a clipped form, 'Medice, cura te ipsum', across Europe.

In the King James Bible, pride 'goeth before' what, while a haughty spirit comes before a fall?

Destruction is what Proverbs 16:18 pairs with pride; the fall belongs to the haughty spirit. Everyday speech has squeezed the two halves into 'pride goes before a fall'.