A. Advice and warnings

proverb	paraphrase
Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.	Don’t depend on something happening, because it may not.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.	Don’t invest all your efforts or attention in just one thing.
Never judge a book by its cover.	Don’t judge people/things by their outward appearance.
Never look a gift-horse in the mouth.	Never refuse good fortune when it is there in front of you.
Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves.	Take care of small sums of money and they will become large sums.
We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.	We’ll deal with that problem when it actually happens.

B. Key elements

Proverbs can be grouped by key elements, for example, animals and birds.

When the cat’s away, the mice will play. [people will take advantage of someone else’s absence to behave more freely]
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. [you can try to persuade someone, but you can’t force them]
One swallow doesn’t make a summer. [one positive sign does not mean that all will be well; a swallow is a bird that returns to Britain in late spring]

As with learning all vocabulary, visualising an element of it often helps.


There’s no smoke without fire. / Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. [rumours are usually based on some degree of truth]	People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. [don’t criticise others’ faults if you suffer from them yourself]

Too many cooks spoil the broth /brɒθ/. [too many people interfering is a bad way of doing things; broth = a kind of soup]	Many hands make light work. [a lot of people helping makes a job easier]

Speakers tend to use proverbs to comment on a situation, often at the end of a true story someone has told, or in response to some event.