page_title: Proverb
section_title: In literature
hierarchical_section_title: Proverb / Use / In literature
caption_attribution_description: English: Created proverb by Tolkien, on American bumper sticker
context_page_description: A proverb is a simple, concrete, traditional saying that expresses a perceived truth based on common sense or experience. Proverbs are often metaphorical and use formulaic language. Collectively, they form a genre of folklore.
  Some proverbs exist in more than one language because people borrow them from languages and cultures similar to theirs. In the West, the Bible and medieval Latin have played a considerable role in distributing proverbs. 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," whereas another shows that, of the 106 most common and widespread proverbs across Europe, eleven are from the Bible. However, almost every culture has its own unique proverbs.
context_section_description: Many authors have used proverbs in their writings, for a very wide variety of literary genres: epics, novels, poems, short stories.
  Probably the most famous user of proverbs in novels is J. R. R. Tolkien in his The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series. Herman Melville is noted for creating proverbs in Moby Dick and in his poetry. Also, C. S. Lewis created a dozen proverbs in The Horse and His Boy, and Mercedes Lackey created dozens for her invented Shin'a'in and Tale'edras cultures; Lackey's proverbs are notable in that they are reminiscent to those of Ancient Asia - e.g. "Just because you feel certain an enemy is lurking behind every bush, it doesn't follow that you are wrong" is like to "Before telling secrets on the road, look in the bushes." These authors are notable for not only using proverbs as integral to the development of the characters and the story line, but also for creating proverbs.
  Among medieval literary texts, Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde plays a special role because Chaucer's usage seems to challenge the truth value of proverbs by exposing their epistemological unreliability. Rabelais used proverbs to write an entire chapter of Gargantua.
  The patterns of using proverbs in literature can change over time. A study of "classical Chinese novels" found proverb use as frequently as one proverb every 3,500 words in Water Margin (Sui-hu chuan) and one proverb every 4,000 words in Wen Jou-hsiang. But modern Chinese novels have fewer proverbs by far.
  Proverbs (or portions of them) have been the inspiration for titles of books: The Bigger they Come by Erle Stanley Gardner, and Birds of a Feather (several books with this title), Devil in the Details (multiple books with this title). Sometimes a title alludes to a proverb, but does not actually quote much of it, such as The Gift Horse's Mouth by Robert Campbell. Some books or stories have titles that are twisted proverbs, anti-proverbs, such as No use dying over spilled milk, When life gives you lululemons, and two books titled Blessed are the Cheesemakers. The twisted proverb of last title was also used in the Monty Python movie Life of Brian, where a person mishears one of Jesus Christ's beatitudes, "I think it was 'Blessed are the cheesemakers.'"
  Some books and stories are built around a proverb. Some of Tolkien's books have been analyzed as having "governing proverbs" where "the acton of a book turns on or fulfills a proverbial saying." Some stories have been written with a proverb overtly as an opening, such as "A stitch in time saves nine" at the beginning of "Kitty's Class Day", one of Louisa May Alcott's Proverb Stories. Other times, a proverb appears at the end of a story, summing up a moral to the story, frequently found in Aesop's Fables, such as "Heaven helps those who help themselves" from Hercules and the Wagoner. In a novel by the Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma, "proverbs are used to conclude each chapter".
  Proverbs have also been used strategically by poets. Sometimes proverbs (or portions of them or anti-proverbs) are used for titles, such as "A bird in the bush" by Lord Kennet and his stepson Peter Scott and "The blind leading the blind" by Lisa Mueller. Sometimes, multiple proverbs are important parts of poems, such as Paul Muldoon's "Symposium", which begins "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it hold its nose to the grindstone and hunt with the hounds. Every dog has a stitch in time..." In Finnish there are proverb poems written hundreds of years ago. The Turkish poet Refiki wrote an entire poem by stringing proverbs together, which has been translated into English poetically yielding such verses as "Be watchful and be wary, / But seldom grant a boon; / The man who calls the piper / Will also call the tune." Eliza Griswold also created a poem by stringing proverbs together, Libyan proverbs translated into English.
  Because proverbs are familiar and often pointed, they have been used by a number of hip-hop poets. This has been true not only in the USA, birthplace of hip-hop, but also in Nigeria. Since Nigeria is so 
caption: Created proverb from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings on a bumper sticker.
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