(thing) by legbagede Sun Mar 11 2001 at 7:19:01
Better to walk than grow angry with the road.

At the bottom of patience there is heaven.

Hope is the pillar of the world.

It is the heart that carries one to hell or to heaven.

He who travels alone tells lies.

A blind man does not show the way to the blind.

The surface of water is beautiful, but it is not good to sleep on.

Nobody wars with ghosts.

When the spider would attack, it simply extends its web.

The young cannot teach tradition to the old.

Ashes fly back in the faces of those that throw them.

Wherever a man goes to dwell, his character goes with him.

Calamity has no voice: true suffering rarely speaks.

Alone, wisdom destroys you; with another, you destroy wisdom.

Defend us from the wrath of the meek.
Source: Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, Wit and Wisdom from West Africa (London: Tinsley, 1865), 332p. Burton spent several years throughout Western and Central Africa (what is now the Sudan, Ethiopia and Nigeria) looking for the source of the Nile at the behest and under the patronage of the Royal Society (a story well portrayed, incidentally, in the film "Mountains of the Moon"). These translations of proverbs are exhaustively footnoted in Burton's text, with reference to other cultures' similar tenets, particularly those of Islam.
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