The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.
~ Francis Bacon

Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until you've watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you.
~ Nicholson Baker

Proverbs are mental gems gathered in the diamond fields of the mind.
~ William R. Alger

How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism.
~ Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.
~ Thomas Carlyle

A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.
~ Miguel De Cervantes

I believe there's no proverb but what is true; they are all so many sentences and maxims drawn from experience, the universal mother of sciences.
~ Miguel De Cervantes

I do not say a proverb is amiss when aptly and reasonably applied, but to be forever discharging them, right or wrong, hit or miss, renders conversation insipid and vulgar.
~ Miguel De Cervantes

Proverbs are short sentences drawn from long experience.
~ Miguel De Cervantes

What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious: the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere, from Oregon apple valley to boreal New England, that we do not know whether to be temperate orchards or sterile climate.
~ Edward Dahlberg

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings -- they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race and the man who orders his life according to their teaching cannot go far wrong.
~ Norman Douglas

For proverbs are the pith, the proprieties, the proofs, the purities, the elegancies, as the commonest so the commendablest phrases of a language. To use them is a grace, to understand them a good.
~ John Florio

A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.
~ R. Buckminster Fuller

A collections of anecdotes and maxims is the greatest of treasures for the man of the world, for he knows how to intersperse conversation with the former in fit places, and to recollect the latter on proper occasions.
~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Don't you go believing in sayings, Picotee: they are all made by men, for their own advantages. Women who use public proverbs as a guide through events are those who have not ingenuity enough to make private ones as each event occurs.
~ Thomas Hardy

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
~ Aldous Huxley

He may justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind, who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind.
~ Samuel Johnson

They are like the clue in the labyrinth, or the compass in the night.
~ Joseph Joubert

A proverb is not a proverb to you until life has illustrated it.
~ John Keats