Book of Proverbs
The Hebrew Bible's anthology of wisdom sayings and a foundational model for the proverb collection.
Proverbs is a compiled wisdom book, traditionally associated with Solomon but internally marked as an anthology: several sections carry their own headings, including sayings attributed to Agur and to King Lemuel's mother.
Its dominant form is the two-line saying built on parallelism, where the second line completes, contrasts with, or intensifies the first. That structure made the sayings memorable in oral transmission and shaped the English proverb form through centuries of translation.
Its influence on quotation culture is hard to overstate: phrases such as "pride goes before a fall" circulate widely detached from the book, and often in wordings no translation actually prints.
Common mistake: reading each verse as a promise. The book presents general patterns of how life usually goes, and Ecclesiastes and Job sit in the same tradition specifically as counterweights.
“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”
Keep reading the glossary
A traditional saying that expresses a generally accepted truth — almost always anonymous.
Verse composed largely of aphoristic sayings, usually didactic in intent.
A first-century BCE line collection that is the ancestor of the modern quote book.
Erasmus's monumental 1500 collection of Greek and Latin proverbs — the book that put classical sayings back into European speech.