The collection / 1,755 fragments
Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.
Meaning: The phrase rejects a claim as implausible, suggesting that the speaker feels someone is asking too much of their belief. A strong expression of doubt still needs reasons when the actual claim matters.
Meaning: A hopeful or generous expectation can shape how someone approaches a situation. The proverb links belief with a favourable result, but its useful reading treats that link as encouragement rather than a guarantee that thoughts control events.
Meaning: Do not worry more about a small loss than about a larger loss that includes it. Keep the relative importance of what is at stake in view when deciding where attention belongs.
Meaning: Early guidance can shape later habits while they are still developing. The flexible twig pictures that opportunity, without establishing that a person’s future is fixed or that harsh discipline is justified.
Meaning: Early influences may leave a lasting direction in someone’s habits. The inclined tree develops the bent-twig image, without proving that a person cannot change or that upbringing explains every later choice.
Meaning: A convincing lie can be especially harmful because people are more likely to trust it. Best is an ironic description of successful deception, without proving that every false statement has the same consequences.
Meaning: Let the person best suited to the immediate task take the lead. The dog and obstacle image values relevant capability, without making one success a permanent rank or denying others the chance to learn and contribute.
Meaning: A valued occasion can be honoured by a worthwhile action. The saying connects the significance of a day with what someone does on it, without making good deeds depend on a special date or deciding which occasions everyone must value.
Meaning: Following instructions may appear to protect someone from blame. The proverb voices that promise strongly, but obedience does not establish that the instruction or the resulting action is right.
Meaning: The saying minimises punishment with birch twigs by claiming that it does not break ribs. The narrow comparison leaves other pain and harm outside its account.
Meaning: Each person has responsibilities that others cannot completely fulfil on their behalf. The bird tending its own egg points to a necessary personal contribution, while leaving room for shared care, practical support and different capacities.
Meaning: One person may do the work while someone else takes the reward. Notice who prepares an opportunity and who receives the benefit or credit.
Meaning: People with similar interests, habits or outlooks often spend time together. A shared activity or way of thinking can make a group feel familiar and easier to join.
Meaning: The saying demands that a person use an ability they possess. Its command to force the unwilling raises a question about responsibility and consent.
Meaning: Even those who seem small or unimportant still have needs. Do not overlook someone’s basic requirements because they have little status or visibility.
Meaning: Do not make threats that you cannot carry out. Showing teeth without a bite pictures an empty display of force, without requiring aggression or treating a peaceful refusal as weakness.
Meaning: Trying every available thing without discrimination is pictured as eventually biting a poisonous weed. The warning favours judgment over indiscriminate sampling; it is a figurative caution, not evidence that curiosity is dangerous or a guide to identifying safe plants.
Meaning: A small useful provision made early may be better than waiting all day with none. The morning morsel image values something available, without making any small response adequate for a larger need.
Meaning: A critic may display the very fault they condemn in someone else. The two birds turn an accusation back on its speaker and invite a closer look at the critic’s own conduct.
Meaning: An outward difference need not make one thing less good than another. The contrasting plums encourage judging what matters beyond appearance, without claiming that all differences are irrelevant or that their qualities must be identical.
Meaning: A fierce burst of trouble may pass quickly. The saying offers patience during an intense moment, but its confident prediction should not be treated as a guarantee about weather or hardship.
Editorial context: This metaphor criticises refusal to consider evidence. Visual disability is not unwillingness to understand, and disagreement alone does not prove refusal.
Meaning: Someone who refuses to consider available evidence may resist understanding more than someone who lacks information. The saying criticises deliberate avoidance, but its sight metaphor must not equate visual disability with unwillingness or ignorance.
Meaning: The saying uses an imagined blind person’s wish to see something as praise for it. Its compliment depends on a disability comparison rather than explaining the thing’s merit.
Meaning: The comparison questions an account offered without the experience or evidence needed for its subject. Its disability-based insult should be distinguished from that useful question.