Proverbs Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
99 free Proverbs trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Proverbs are the sayings everyone knows and almost nobody can source. Half of them are older than the languages they are quoted in, half were coined by a poet, a playwright or an ad man, and the neat origin stories that circulate online are often invented after the fact. These 99 questions cover the proverbs people actually quote: which word completes the saying and which word the popular version dropped, the play or poem or epistle it came from, the statesmen and coaches who made a line famous, sayings borrowed from Latin, Greek, Arabic and the languages of Asia, and the pairs of proverbs that give opposite advice. Every answer comes with a short explanation that adds the detail behind the words. Play it to find out how many sayings you have been misquoting, or print it for a pub quiz, a classroom round or a family night.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which word stood where 'curiosity' now sits in the cat proverb as Ben Jonson wrote it in 1598?
Care
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.
Q 02'Money is the root of all evil' drops which word from 1 Timothy 6:10, which condemns 'the ___ of money'?
Love
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.
Q 03Which bomber's manifesto gave him away partly by using 'eat your cake and have it too', the older word order?
Ted Kaczynski
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.
Q 04Fred R. Barnard spread 'a picture is worth a thousand words' in the 1920s through a journal serving which trade?
Advertising
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.
Q 05Which First Lady's 1996 book took its title from the proverb 'It takes a village to raise a child'?
Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village called the line an African proverb, yet no evidence ties that exact saying to any African culture.
Q 06'An apple a day keeps the doctor away' was first recorded in 1866 as a proverb from which country?
Wales
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.'
Q 07'May you live in interesting times' is billed as a curse from which country, which has no such saying?
China
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.
Q 08Which saying, worded by Algernon Sidney in 1698, do most Americans polled place in the Bible?
God helps those who help themselves
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.
Q 09Which put-down was tacked onto the end of 'Jack of all trades' in the 1700s?
master of none
'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'.
Q 10'Trust, but verify', Ronald Reagan's refrain at every meeting with Gorbachev, is a proverb in which language?
Russian
Russian 'doveryay, no proveryay' rhymes, and the historian Suzanne Massie taught it to Reagan before the 1987 INF Treaty signing.
Q 11Which US president called 'speak softly and carry a big stick' a West African proverb, on little evidence?
Theodore Roosevelt
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.
Q 12'This too shall pass', a king's motto in a tale Abraham Lincoln retold in 1859, is traced to which country's poets?
Persia
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.
Q 13'It ain't over till the fat lady sings' evokes Brünnhilde's long farewell in an opera cycle by which composer?
Q 21'Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater' entered English in 1849 from which language, recorded there in 1512?
German
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.
Q 22'No such thing as a free lunch' mocks a 19th-century come-on by which American businesses?
Saloons
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.
Q 23Which squire, briefly governor of the 'island' Barataria, peppers Cervantes's novel with ironic Spanish proverbs?
Sancho Panza
Richard Wagner
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.
Q 14'The nail that sticks out gets hammered down', often set against 'the squeaky wheel gets the grease', comes from where?
Japan
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.
Q 15'Good fences make good neighbors' is said twice by a stone-hauling neighbour in a 1914 poem by which American?
Robert Frost
Robert Frost's 'Mending Wall' actually doubts the line: its narrator insists 'something there is that doesn't love a wall'.
Q 16'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
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.
Q 17'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread' and 'to err is human' come from a 1711 poem by which English poet?
Alexander Pope
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'.
Q 18'What does not kill me makes me stronger' is maxim eight in Twilight of the Idols, by which philosopher?
Friedrich Nietzsche
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.
Q 19'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely' comes from an 1887 letter to a future bishop by whom?
Lord Acton
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'.
Q 20'A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step' comes from the Tao Te Ching, credited to which sage?
Laozi
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.
Sancho Panza gets his 'island' as a prank by a duke and duchess, yet he judges its disputes wisely before giving the job up.
Q 24'Every cloud has a silver lining' grew from an image in the 1634 masque Comus, by which poet?
John Milton
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.
Q 25'Knowledge is power' is credited to which English philosopher, whose 1597 Latin runs 'ipsa scientia potestas est'?
Francis Bacon
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.
Q 26In Britain's 'Red sky at night, ___ delight', whose delight is it, where Americans say sailors'?
Shepherds'
Shepherds' delight is the British form and sailors' the American, and the forecast is old enough for Jesus to cite it in Matthew 16.
Q 27'Don't count your chickens before they hatch' is the usual moral of a fable about a daydreaming girl carrying what?
Milk
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.
Q 28Which animals 'also fall from trees' in a well-known Japanese proverb meaning that even experts slip up?
Monkeys
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'.
Q 29Which word completes 'If wishes were horses, ___ would ride', found in an early collection of Scots proverbs?
Beggars
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.'
Q 30'Remember that time is money' comes from a 1748 'Advice to a Young Tradesman' by which American polymath?
Benjamin Franklin
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.