Proverbial quotes:

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Proverbial wisdom counsels against risk and change. But sitting ducks fare worst of all. -- Mason Cooley
The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature. -- Lafcadio Hearn
Families, generally, suck. And I say that as someone who, like my husband, had parents who proved the proverbial exception to the rule. -- Julie Burchill
My interest in the sciences started with mathematics in the very beginning, and later with chemistry in early high school and the proverbial home chemistry set. -- Rudolph A. Marcus
As the Tories know, the problem with setting yourself up as a shining example for others to follow is that when you get caught out, that proverbial substance really hits the fan. -- Jo Brand
I am told that there is a proverbial phrase among the Inuit: 'A long time ago, in the future.' Let the children see our history, and maybe it will help to shape the future. -- Romeo LeBlanc
Vulgarism in language is the distinguishing characteristic of bad company, and a bad education. A man of fashion avoids nothing with more care than that. Proverbial expressions, and trite sayings, are the flowers of the rhetoric of vulgar man. -- Lord Chesterfield
More and more, Democrats are starting to worry they that they have a more um, colorful version of Jimmy Carter on their hands. Obama acts cool as a proverbial cucumber but that awful '70s show seems frightfully close to a rerun. -- Eric Alterman
If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you've got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that. -- Dwayne Johnson
You don't go walking into the proverbial lion's den lightly. You start with a good breakfast. -- Jim Butcher
Hip-hop...has been the proverbial key that's opened the door for me to roam this breathtaking planet. -- Raquel Cepeda
To stumble twice against the same stone, is a proverbial disgrace. [Lat., Culpa enim illa, bis ad eundem, vulgari reprehensa proverbio est.] -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
Life's not easy for anyone. Everyone has scars they're afraid to show and we all get slammed headfirst into a proverbial locker from time to time by someone bigger and badder. -- Sherrilyn Kenyon
It is far easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle's eye, hump and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound and honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory. -- Kwame Nkrumah
Good health, peace of mind, being outdoors, camaraderie - those are all wonderful things that come to you when running. But for me, the real pull of running - the proverbial icing on the cake - has always been racing. -- Bill Rodgers
We have become ninety-nine percent money mad. The method of living at home modestly and within our income, laying a little by systematically for the proverbial rainy day which is due to come, can almost be listed among the lost arts. -- George Washington Carver
I'm the proverbial kid in the candy store. I'm a guy who is lucky enough to have been chosen to turn his compulsive hobby into a profession. If I didn't have my job, I'd be doing almost the same thing for free. -- Dick Latvala
My relationship with my father had been on the proverbial fritz since the time I was fifteen and called the police to report him for child molesting. He had never molested me, but I wanted to have a party that weekend and needed him out of the house. -- Chelsea Handler
The power of resistance is to set an example: not necessarily to change the person with whom you disagree, but to empower the one who is watching and whose growth is not yet completed, whose path is not at all clear, whose direction is still very much up in the proverbial air. -- Tim Wise
The emotions of the ignorant man are continuously kept at a pitch by the most blood-curdling stories about Anarchism. Not a thing too outrageous to be employed against this philosophy and its exponents. Therefore Anarchism represents to the unthinking what the proverbial bad man does to the child,-a black monster bent on swallowing everything; in short, destruction and violence. -- Emma Goldman
The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion. -- Douglas Hofstadter
Friendship, on the other hand, serves a great host of different purposes all at the same time. In whatever direction you turn, it still remains yours. No barrier can shut it out. It can never be untimely; it can never be in the way. We need friendship all the time, just as much as we need the proverbial prime necessities of life, fire and water. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
I travel up and down the country and I've been all around the middle of America for many years. Middle America is not one big mass of people with a proverbial beer in its hand, keeping the country down. That is not my experience of it and I don't labor under that misconception. And we have a long tradition of coming together through music in our country. -- Wynton Marsalis
The common people do not accurately adapt their thoughts to objects; nor, secondly, do they accurately adapt their words to their thoughts; they do not mean to lie; but, taking no pains to be exact, they give you very false accounts. A great part of their language is proverbial; if anything rocks at all, they say it rocks like a cradle; and in this way they go on. -- Samuel Johnson
There is still nothing on the proverbial scoreboard. -- John Motson
Life expectancy is a statistical phenomenon. You could still be hit by the proverbial bus tomorrow. -- Ray Kurzweil
I was a litigation lawyer, following the crowd off the proverbial cliff, when I pressed the pause button. -- Robin S. Sharma
There's no question that Kennedy was an utter failure as a passer of laws during his proverbial thousand days. -- Rick Perlstein
One of the most persistent images in American urbanism is that of the proverbial city on a hill, as first envisioned on these shores by the Puritan John Winthrop, via the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. -- Martin Filler
The lesson is, because there will be many lemons in life, to learn to make the proverbial lemonade - and be open and honest. That's the best way of doing damage control and positioning yourself for success. -- Vivek Wadhwa
Self-sabotage is the proverbial hammer over the head that finally wakes us up, demanding that we pay attention. For most of us, it takes something devastating to crack us open, to get us out of our minds and into our hearts. -- Debbie Ford
Twitter is the perfect complement to television. TV has always been social. You talk to the person you're sitting next to on the couch. You talk to the people you're - you know, at work with the next day around the proverbial water cooler. -- Dick Costolo
Here I am, a not over-good business man, a second-rate engineer. I can make poor mechanical drawings. I play the piano after a fashion. In fact, I am one of those proverbial Jack-of-all-trades who are usually failures. Why I am not, I can't tell you. -- Charles M. Schwab
I was feeling as sick as the proverbial donkey. -- Mick McCarthy
That proverbial saying, "Ill news goes quick and far. -- Plutarch
Lendl has remained throughout as calm as the proverbial iceberg. -- Dan Maskell
Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold. -- Ada Louise Huxtable
I hitched my wagon to an electron rather than the proverbial star. -- David Sarnoff
I fear oblivion. I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark. -- John Green
Unproductive worry - like Parkinson's proverbial law - tends to expand to fill the time available. -- Neal A. Maxwell
Awakening your spiritual self is like having a second childhood with faulty parents, broken bones and proverbial brussel sprouts." -- Christopher Hawke
He will not let you come barging in to his world like the proverbial bull in the china shop. -- Laurell K. Hamilton
There is an old saying which, from its truth, has become proverbial, that friendships should be immortal, enmities mortal. -- Livy
There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of un-hatched chicks. -- Neil Gaiman
Placing the state in charge of moral principles is equivalent to putting the proverbial fox in charge of the chicken coop. -- Murray Rothbard
The art and act of writing - speaking just for myself - involves getting your proverbial ass in the proverbial chair. -- Jerry Stahl
The proverbial thirteenth chime of the clock - is not only wrong itself, but calls into question everything that came before it. -- Glenn Reynolds
The lady is proverbial for her skill in eluding definition ... she may be described merely as the female of the favored social class. -- Emily James Smith Putnam
If ever there was a proverbial truth, it's the more you give, the more you get. Give and start experiencing a life of fulfillment! -- Jen Lilley
Most people stop looking when they find the proverbial needle in the haystack. I would continue looking to see if there were other needles. -- Albert Einstein
There are but few proverbial sayings that are not true, for they are all drawn from experience itself, which is the mother of all sciences. -- Miguel de Cervantes
I've been at stand-up for years: after a while, you get as jaded as the proverbial gynecologist who no longer enjoys drugging and violating his patients. -- Emo Philips
The proverbial notion of historical distance consists in our having lost ninety-five of every hundred original facts, so the remaining ones can be arranged however one likes. -- Robert Musil
The proverbial Englishman, we know from old chronicler Froissart, takes his pleasures sadly, and the Englishwoman goes a step further and takes her pleasures in sadness itself. -- Jerome K. Jerome
And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him. -- James Joyce
The proverbial wisdom of the populace in the street, on the roads, and in the markets instructs the ear of him who studies man more fully than a thousand rules ostentatiously displayed. -- Johann Kaspar Lavater
Besides, it happens (how, I cannot tell) that an idea launched like a javelin in proverbial form strikes with sharper point on the hearerâ??s mind and leaves implanted barbs for meditation... -- Desiderius Erasmus
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. General recognition of this fact is shown in the proverbial phrase "It is the busiest man who has time to spare." -- C. Northcote Parkinson
The immemorial ingratitude of rulers and commonwealths is proverbial. Especially common is ingratitude to Israel - the People that has achieved so much of eternal worth, but has rarely succeeded in winning gratitude. -- Joseph Hertz
I am grateful that I have rights in the proverbial public square--but, as a practical matter, my most cherished rights are those that I possess in my bedroom and hospital room and death chamber. -- Jacob M. Appel
You may never have heard of Joseph Overton and his proverbial window but you most certainly have heard the Republican presidential campaign in 2015 year not just flinging the window open but shattering all its glass. -- Rachel Maddow

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