Ever notice how trite sayings come in pairs, and often contradict each other? This goes to show that nothing is ever absolute even in popular wisdom...
Even that "nothing is absolute" isn't absolute? -- LayneThomas
- Yes! But then again my "yes" is absolute :-) and since nothing can be absolute I guess it shouldn't count!'' :-)
See CretanParadox (not GreekParadox?)
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." (George Santayana)
Here are a few. Please add your own
- From The Sphinx in Mystery Men: He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.
- The Sphinx's koans were more a single palindromic phrase, the first part's subject and object being reversed in the second part
- Too many cooks spoil the broth ...
- Many hands make light work
- LookBeforeYouLeap ... (relates to tests versus exceptions)
- Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
- Great minds think alike ...
- Fools seldom differ
- Small minds run in small circles.
- To be is to do -- Shakespeare
- To do is to be -- Niestchze
- Do be do be do -- Frank Sinatra (Strangers in the night) :-)
- Ya ba da ba do -- Fred Flintstone :3
- Rooby-rooby-roo -- Scooby Doo
- Birds of a feather flock together.
- The early bird gets the worm ...
- The second mouse gets the cheese.
- The early worm, gets eaten...
- Morgenstund hat Blei im Arsch (for non-German speaking readers, it relates to what us night people would like to do to morning people)...
- The clothes make the man.
- The man makes the suit.
- L'habit ne fait pas le moine. (The habit doesn't make the monk.)
- Don't judge a book by its cover.
- Read the back of a book before reading the whole book.
- To know a thing is to forget its name (Zen saying)
- Beware Greeks bearing gifts.
- Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
- Freedom is an eagle with both a right and left wing, and moderates are the crap coming from the middle.
- There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos. (Jim Hightower)
- The eagle has a left wing and a right wing, but they're just for flapping; the bird brain is in the middle (Don Joyce of Negativland)
- All things in moderation. (Greek attitude.)
- MiddleWay or MiddlePath? is the Buddhist practice of non-extremism
- Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword. (Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton) (aka: 'The pen is mightier than the sword')
- Actions speak louder than words.
- He who believes the pen is mightier than the sword must have an impressive reach.
- Pen and sword in accord - Musashi
- Don't pick fights with those who buy ink by the barrel. -- SamuelClemens [MarkTwain]
- Those who don't pay for their ink are often the heralds of cheap words.
- The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
- Silence is golden.
- The nail that stands up gets hammered down.
- (Those clever Germans combine both thoughts into a single admonishment: "sagen ist silber, aber schweigen ist gold")
- The truth will set you free
- Bide your time
- There's no time like the present
- Forgive and forget
- He who forgets easily invites injury ("Qui pardonne facilement invite à l'offense"; Corneille, French playwright)
- Revenge is a dish best served cold
- La revenge est douce au coeur de l'indien (Revenge is sweet in the Indian's heart; French-Canadian proverb)
- Turn the other cheek (Jesus)
- The best defense is a good offense
- Answer in kind
- Eye for eye, tooth for tooth (the Old Testament)
- You touch me you touch my gang
- Money won't make you happy
- A man with small means is a rich man (Jewish proverb)
- Money talks and bullshit walks
- Money makes the world go round
- Remember the Golden Rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules.
- Money doesn't buy happiness, but it sure helps.
- Money doesn't buy happiness, but lack of money brings sorrow. (Originally spoken by me, right now :-P)
- Money doesn't buy happiness, but it sure lets you look in a lot more places!
- Money can't buy happiness, it can only buy things that make you happy.
- Money can't buy happiness; but who cares, when you can rent it?
- Who pays the piper calls the tune.
- Darkness before the dawn
- Flattery will get you nowhere
- Flatteries only profit those who say it
- Flatteries flatteries they recharge my batteries
- Hey, this is a very insightful Wiki page!
Challenged
- You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. (Abraham Lincoln)
- A sucker is born every minute (P.T. Barnum) Barnum never said it -- it was actually a competitor of his, deriding all the rubes going to see one of Barnum's shows, a knockoff copy of the Cardiff Giant hoax (a lifelike carved statue "proving" the existence of giants). Thus the great irony of the saying. Barnum did regularly pull one over on folks, but for no more than the price of a ticket, and people still got a show without buying any snake oil. It was sort of the Weekly World News of the 19th century. This Way To The Egress, ladies and gents.
---> the first saying means in effect, "don't expect to be able to fool everyone all the time", while the second means "there is an endless supply of fools to take advantage of". Their surface statements don't contradict each other, but the ultimate moral they convey does in fact contradict)
They carry their context with them. The first is clearly from politics, regardless of the attribution. The second is clearly from hucksterism. As such, they're not trite and they contradict the point of this page; contextless sayings are crap.
- Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man.
- Communism does the opposite.
---> Same thing here; surface meaning is merely reflexive rather than contradictory, but the intended reading is that it's a different group of people doing the exploitation, said with irony.)
The intended meaning doesn't contradict at all but reinforces. X is exploitative, Y is exploitative too. And we all know there is no Z that isn't X or Y. Blech.
- The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
- Silence is golden.
- The nail that stands up gets hammered down.
---> Fundamental misunderstanding of one or several of these here? The first and the third are both 'Things which are broken get fixed', and the second seems unrelated outside of the sense that the first and second are both sound-related. Also, the point of the concept of the first is to silence the wheel, so it's the same as the second in that sense. I'm not seeing a contradiction in any of these.
You need to consider connotation as well as denotation. First and third refer to 'people' being noisy, some of them getting 'grease' (positive attention, project funding), some of them getting 'hammered down' (punitive). The first and second refer to opposing approaches towards certain forms of wealth... squeaky or silent you get something of value.
- The truth will set you free
---> This is only a contradiction if freedom is equivalent to bliss. Personally I find this highly tenuous as the two are orthogonal.
Again, connotation vs. denotation. "The truth will set you free" rarely refers to actual 'freedom', and very often is used with the connotation of the truth offering relief from a mental burden or troubles... not quite bliss, but similar.
- "It's a joke son, you're supposed to laugh!" -- Senator Claghorn (later reprised by Foghorn Leghorn)
Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Out of sight, out of mind
- Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies
- Never wrestle with a pig: You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.
Comments
This page is a subtle example of why patterns need a context element.
Some of these are not direct contradictions - NonOrthogonality? is everywhere these days. . .
I think, furthermore, that people are just dumping their own favorite trite sayings here without regard for the intent, purpose or point of the page.
Now, BertrandMeyer talks about the distinction between a principle and a platitude (although I don't think the observation is original to him). A principle can be negated (or otherwise turned around) and still make sense, whereas the opposite of a platitude is just foolish. More on this has been written at BertrandMeyerOnPlatitudes.
I think most of these are not intended to be truths, but to give the inarticulate a way of expressing what they think or feel in a succinct phrase that everyone will recognize.
I doubt that quotes constitute trite sayings, since no one other than the quoted says it...
Except many famous quotes evolve into cliches. People in RealLife do say many of those quotes - if they are repeated often enough, they are indistinguishable from cliches/trite sayings
"What we need are some new cliches." -- Samuel R. Goldwyn
See: PointyHairedBoss ChecksAndBalances
CategoryWisdom
Trite Sayings Come In Pairs