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[133] 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 ...
The proverb is found in a number of forms. Benjamin Franklin included a version in his Poor Richard's Almanack (1758), but over a century earlier, the poet George Herbert included it in a 1640 collection of aphorisms. [4] [5] [6] Predecessors include the following:
"Proverb" is a translation of the Hebrew word mashal, but "mashal" has a wider range of meanings than the short, catchy saying implied by the English word. Thus, roughly half the book is made up of "sayings" of this type, while the other half consists of longer poetic units of various types.
The story is mostly cited in philosophical or religious texts and management or psychology advisors. While in the original version the son loses his horse and the father comments, in recent (Western) versions a more direct view is found: The father himself is the horse's owner and directly comments on his situation.
A proverbial phrase or expression is a type of conventional saying similar to a proverb and transmitted by oral tradition. The difference is that a proverb is a fixed expression, while a proverbial phrase permits alterations to fit the grammar of the context. [1] [2] In 1768, John Ray defined a proverbial phrase as:
Two boats and a helicopter, the instruments of rescue most frequently cited in the parable, during a coastguard rescue demonstration. The parable of the drowning man, also known as Two Boats and a Helicopter, is a short story, often told as a joke, most often about a devoutly Christian man, frequently a minister, who refuses several rescue attempts in the face of approaching floodwaters, each ...
Blind men and the elephant, 1907 American illustration. Blind Men Appraising an Elephant by Ohara Donshu, Edo Period (early 19th century), Brooklyn Museum. The parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it.
The family welcomes the frozen snake, a woodcut by Ernest Griset. The Farmer and the Viper is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 176 in the Perry Index. [1] It has the moral that kindness to evil will be met by betrayal and is the source of the idiom "to nourish a viper in one's bosom".