Bruegel's Proverbs

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Netherlandish Proverbs: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1559 (Staatliche Museen, Berlin)

From the proverb speaks a noli me tangere of experience.

With this, it proclaims its ability to transform experience into tradition. Proverbs cannot be applied to situations. Instead, they have a kind of magical character: they transform the situation. It is scarcely within the powers of the individual to purify the lessons of his life completely by purging them of his particular experience. But the proverb can do this by taking possession of them.

It turns the lesson that has been experienced into a wave in the living chain of innumerable lessons that flow down from eternity.

Jean Paulhan: Expérience du proverbe.

Walter Benjamin, On Proverbs, c. 1932, translated by Rodney Livingstone in Selected Writings, vol. 2, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 1999


In fact, one might go on and ask oneself whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman's relationship -- whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way. It is a kind of procedure which may perhaps most adequately be exemplified by the proverb, if one thinks of this as an ideogram of a story. A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral twines about a happening like ivy around a wall.

Walter Benjamin: The Storyteller, first published in Orient and Occident, October 1936, translated by Harry Zohn in Selected Writings, vol. 3, eds. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland, 2002

The point of view might be phrased in this way: Proverbs are strategies for dealing with situations. In so far as situations are typical and recurrent in a given social structure, people develop names for them and strategies for handling them. Another name for strategies might be attitudes.

A work like Madame Bovary (or its homely American translation, Babbitt) is the strategic naming of a situation. It singles out a pattern of experience that is sufficiently representative of our social structure, that recurs sufficiently often mutandis mutatis, for people to ‘need a word for it’ and to adopt an attitude towards it. Each work of art is the addition of a word to an informal dictionary.

Art forms like ‘tragedy’ or ‘comedy’ or ‘satire’ would be treated as equipments for living, that size up situations in various ways and in keeping with correspondingly various attitudes.

Kenneth Burke, Literature as Equipment for Living, 1938 in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 1941

Netherlandish Proverbs (detail): Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1559 (Staatliche Museen, Berlin)

(left) To pull to get the longest end
(center) Love is on the side where the money bag hangs
(lower left) He who has spilt his porridge cannot scrape it all up again
(right) To barely be able to reach from one loaf to the other
(on table) A hoe without a handle
(under table) To look for the hatchet / Here he is with his lantern




To even be able to tie the devil to a pillow



To be a pillar-biter



To bang one's head against a brick wall

One foot shod, the other bare



To bell the cat / To be armed to the teeth / To put your armor on



To fry the whole herring for the sake of the roe / To get the lid on the head



To sit between two stools in the ashes



To be a hen feeler



It depends on the fall of the cards



The world is turned upside down



Leave at least one egg in the nest



To lead each other by the nose



The die is cast



To look through one's fingers

To marry under the broomstick

To have the roof tiled with tarts



To shoot a second bolt to find the first



The roof has lathes



To have a toothache behind the ears / To be pissing against the moon / Here hangs the pot



To shave the fool without lather / Two fools under one hood



It grows out of the window



To play on the pillory



Where the gate is open the pigs will run into the corn / Where the corn decreases the pig increases



To run like one's backside is on fire / He who eats fire craps sparks

To toss feathers in the wind



To gaze at the stork

To want to kill two flies with one stroke



To fall from the ox onto the rear end of the ass



To kiss the ring of the door / To wipe one's backside on the door



To fish behind the net

Big fish eat little fish

To be unable to see the sun shine on the water



It hangs like a privy over a ditch / They both crap in the same hole



To throw one's money into the water



A wall with cracks will soon collapse



To not care whose house is on fire as long as one can warm oneself at the blaze

To drag the block

Fear makes the old woman trot

Horse droppings are not figs



If the blind lead the blind both will fall into the ditch

The journey is not yet over when one can discern the church and the steeple

Everything, however finely spun, finally comes to the sun

To keep one's eye on the sail

To crap on the gallows

Who knows why geese go barefoot?

To see bears dancing / Wild bears prefer each other's company



To throw one's cowl over the fence



It is ill to swim against the stream



The pitcher goes to the water until it finally breaks / The broadest straps are cut from someone else's leather

To catch an eel by the tail

To fall through the basket / To be suspended between heaven and earth



To take the hen's egg and let the goose's egg go



Love is on the side where the money bag hangs



To tie a flaxen beard to the face of Christ



To have to stoop to get on in the world



To cast roses before swine



To fill the well after the calf has already drowned



To be as tame as a lamb



She puts the blue cloak on her husband



Watch out that a black dog does not come in between



One winds on the distaff what the other spins



To carry the day out in baskets



To hold a candle to the Devil



To confess to the Devil



The pig is stabbed through the belly



Two dogs over one bone seldom agree



What is the good of a beautiful plate when there is nothing on it?



The fox and the crane entertain each other

To blow in the ear



To be chalked up for someone



The meat on the spit must be basted



There is no turning the spit with him

To sit on hot coals

To catch fish without a net



Netherlandish Proverbs (detail): Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1559 (Staatliche Museen, Berlin)



Netherlandish Proverbs (detail): Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1559 (Staatliche Museen, Berlin)


Netherlandish Proverbs (detail): Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1559 (Staatliche Museen, Berlin)