English Proverb

This attribution does not refer to a single identifiable author. It is used for anonymous traditional English proverbs: short folk sayings that circulated orally and in print over many generations. Such proverbs typically emerged from everyday experience and communal observation rather than from a named writer, and their wording often varies by region, period, and source. Because they were repeated, adapted, and recorded by many speakers and compilers, precise origins are usually impossible to verify. In quotation collections, labeling a line as an “English proverb” signals that it belongs to this shared tradition of vernacular wisdom, not to an individual creator.