Proverbs at Internet Archive: Taylor & Whiting

Here is a monumental reference work for American proverbs of the 19th century: A Dictionary of American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 1820-1880, by Archer Taylor and Bartlett Jere Whiting.

The proverbs are organized by keyword, with detailed bibliography for each one.

The book's preface explains the methodology they used to collect the proverbs, followed by a detailed bibliography of texts and also secondary reference works.

Here are some of my favorites:

• Rotten apples are the sweetest.
• A new broom sweeps clean.
• Blackberries don't grow on every bush.
• An empty bag can't stand straight.
• Life lies open like a book.
• What's everybody's business is nobody's business.
• Our backs are fitted to our burdens.
• Ants live safely till they have gotten wings.
• The ass knows in whose face he brays.
• You can't get blood out of a stump.
• Let every man drink from his own bottle.
• But buds will be roses, and kittens, cats.
• Don't cross the bridge before you get to it.
• I'll row my own boat against wind and tide.
• He who loves not bread dotes not on dough.
• Other men beat the bush, but you catch the bird.
• A man who is born to be hanged will never be drowned.
• I wasn't born in the brush to be scared of garter snakes.
• Now the bridge that has carried me so well over, shall I not praise it!
• We praised a bridge that carries us safe, even if it is a poor one.
• Book-learning spoils a man if he's got mother-wit, and if he ain't got that, it don't do him any good.

Here's one I made into a slide in a World Proverbs slideshow:

Archer Taylor and Bartlett Jere Whiting are two of the leading proverb scholars of the 20th century, and this book is a fabulous reference work although, be warned, the number of "proverbial phrases" (metaphors, comparisons, other kinds of verbal cliches) outnumber the actual proverbs by far.

A Dictionary of American Proverbs

and Proverbial Phrases, 1820-1880

by Archer Taylor and Bartlett Jere Whiting