Gulistan (Saadi)
Saadi's 1258 Persian classic mixing prose tales with verse maxims on conduct.
The Gulistan ('Rose Garden'), completed by Saadi of Shiraz in 1258, alternates short prose anecdotes with rhymed verse, each pair delivering a lesson about rulers, dervishes, contentment, youth, or the manners of conversation.
It served for centuries as both a moral handbook and a Persian language primer across South and Central Asia, which is why its couplets circulate as proverbs in several languages independently of the book.
Its most famous passage, on the sons of Adam as limbs of one body, is inscribed at the entrance to the United Nations building in New York — one of the clearest cases of a medieval didactic couplet functioning as modern civic quotation.
Common mistake: citing 'Saadi' with no chapter. The Gulistan has eight named chapters, and the anecdotes are numbered within them, so 'Gulistan I.10' is both short and checkable.
“"Human beings are members of a whole, in creation of one essence and soul."”
Keep reading the glossary
The classical Tamil work of 1,330 couplets, one of world literature's densest quotation sources.
The Sanskrit frame-story collection that carried fable maxims across Eurasia.
A traditional saying that expresses a generally accepted truth — almost always anonymous.
Naming the translator, because a quotation in translation is also that translator's wording.