Concise Dictionary of European Proverbs

“A bad beginning makes a bad ending” is the first proverb in this dictionary. Reviewer beware! This sentiment has ten other English versions: two are, “As a tree falls, so shall it lie; as a man lives, so shall he die” and “sow thin; shear thin”. There follow ten German versions of this proverb, one Latin, five French, five Spanish, and one each in Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, Polish and Czechoslovak, then 350 pages later we come to proverb 1804: “You can’t milk a bull” and “You can’t shave an egg”, to use two of the English alternatives. The intellectual effort...