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50 free Proverbs trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which word stood where 'curiosity' now sits in the cat proverb that Ben Jonson printed 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 root of all evil' in the King James text; Paul's Greek word is philargyria, 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 coined 'a picture is worth a thousand words' in 1921 for a journal serving which trade?
Advertising
Advertising man Barnard called the line a Chinese proverb 'so that people would take it seriously', and it is still pinned on Confucius.
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 in Pembrokeshire, in which country?
Wales
Wales supplied the first printed version: '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 known equivalent expression; the 'curse' may descend from Joseph Chamberlain's 1898 line that 'we are living in most interesting times'.
Q 08Which 'biblical' saying, coined by Algernon Sidney in 1698, do 81% of Americans believe is in scripture?
God helps those who help themselves
'God helps those who help themselves' is nowhere in the Bible; Sidney gave it its wording and Poor Richard's Almanack carried it in 1736.
Q 09Which tag was added to 'Jack of all trades' in the 1700s, turning a compliment into a put-down?
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 wrote the line in a January 1900 letter as governor of New York, then made it foreign policy at the 1901 Minnesota State Fair.
Q 12'This too shall pass', a tale of a king's ring that Abraham Lincoln retold in 1859, came from which country's poets?
Persia
Persia's medieval Sufi poets, among them Attar of Nishapur, told of a king given a ring inscribed with the words to temper both joy and grief.
Q 13'It ain't over till the fat lady sings' evokes Brünnhilde's long farewell in an opera cycle by which composer?
Richard Wagner
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, whose free food was salty?
Saloons
Saloons fed drinkers ham, cheese and salted crackers so they would buy more beer; Friedman's 1975 book title turned the line into economics.
Q 23Which squire, briefly governor of the 'island' Barataria, peppers Cervantes's novel with ironic Spanish proverbs?
Sancho Panza
Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung closes the Ring cycle with Brünnhilde's farewell; the line itself was first printed in 1976, quoting Texas Tech's Ralph Carpenter.
Q 14'The nail that sticks out gets hammered down', the answer to '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 repeated 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, an 1889 book by which philosopher?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche filed it under 'Maxims and Arrows' as a lesson 'out of life's school of war', and expanded on the idea in Ecce Homo.
Q 19'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely' comes from an 1887 letter to a bishop by whom?
Lord Acton
Lord Acton went on to tell Bishop Mandell Creighton that 'Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority'.
Q 20'A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step' is chapter 64 of the Tao Te Ching, by which sage?
Laozi
Laozi's line literally says the journey 'starts beneath one's feet', and it is constantly misattributed to his contemporary Confucius.
Sancho Panza's sayings are so characteristic that they have a name, sanchismos, and his 'island' is a fictional fief dreamed up as a duke's prank.
Q 24'Every cloud has a silver lining' grew from the 1634 masque Comus, by which poet who later wrote Paradise Lost?
John Milton
John Milton asked 'did a sable cloud / Turn forth her silver lining on the night?', and the optimist's proverb grew out of that image.
Q 25'Knowledge is power' is credited to which English philosopher, whose 1597 Latin runs 'ipsa scientia potestas est'?
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon's phrase sits in his Meditationes Sacrae; the exact 'scientia potentia est' belongs to the 1668 Latin Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes.
Q 26Withals's 1574 dictionary said fasting was 'a great remedy' for which illness, seeding 'feed a cold, starve a ___'?
Fever
Fever was to be starved and a cold fed, said the old advice; modern medicine backs neither and prescribes rest and fluids for both.
Q 27In 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 28'Don't count your chickens before they hatch' comes from a fable about a daydreaming girl carrying what?
Milk
Milk fills the pail of the daydreaming milkmaid, who imagines eggs, chicks and finally a foal, then skips for joy and spills the lot.
Q 29Which animals 'also fall from trees' in a well-known Japanese proverb meaning that even experts slip up?
Monkeys
Monkeys are the experts in question; the Japanese saying is the stock reminder that anyone, however practised, can make a mistake.
Q 30Which word completes 'If wishes were horses, ___ would ride', recorded in Scots in 1628 as 'pure men wald ride'?
Beggars
Beggars would ride, and the nursery version keeps going: 'If turnips were watches, I'd wear one by my side.'