A Polyglot of Foreign Proverbs: Comprising French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Danish, with English Translations and a General Index

Every culture, it turns out, has found its own way to say the same things. The Dutch warn that 'he who has a wife has a master.' The Danes observe that 'there is no rose without thorns.' The Germans know that 'the early bird catches the worm.' Yet alongside these familiar echoes, there are stranger discoveries: Spanish proverbs about jealousy that sound like gossip, Portuguese sayings about sea voyages that feel alien, French maxims with the precision of epigrams. This 1857 compilation gathers folk wisdom from six languages, offering English translations that sometimes illuminate and sometimes simply bewilder. Henry G. Bohn collected these sayings with scholarly help, organizing them by language so readers can trace patterns or lose themselves in foreign turns of phrase. The proverbs touch everything that mattered to 19th century people and still matters to us: money, marriage, death, honesty, patience, luck. For writers seeking fresh idiom, linguists tracing cultural thought, or anyone curious about how human beings have expressed the same truths in radically different words, this collection remains a peculiar and rewarding treasure house.