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Below is an alphabetical list of widely used and repeated proverbial phrases. If known, their origins are noted. A proverbial phrase or expression is a type of conventional saying similar to a proverb and transmitted by oral tradition.
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Not all Biblical proverbs, however, were distributed to the same extent: one scholar has gathered evidence to show that cultures in which the Bible is the major spiritual book contain "between three hundred and five hundred proverbs that stem from the Bible," [6] whereas another shows that, of the 106 most common and widespread proverbs across ...
The reference to horses was first in James Carmichael's Proverbs in Scots printed in 1628, which included the lines: "And wishes were horses, pure [poor] men wald ride". [4] The first mention of beggars is in John Ray's Collection of English Proverbs in 1670, in the form "If wishes would bide, beggars would ride". [4]
The conventional English translation first appeared in John Heywood's collection of Proverbs in 1546, crediting Erasmus. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable also credits Erasmus, and relates it to other Latin proverbs, "Planta quae saepius transfertus non coalescit" or "Saepius plantata arbor fructum profert exiguum", which mean that a frequently replanted plant or tree yields less fruit ...
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).