Scots Saws

H/B 92 pages, condition is very good. A proverb is essentially a social phenomenon, a part of the oral tradition of a community like its ballads, folk-tales, fables, nursery rhymes, local legends and so on, handed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next: the business of a proverb is to inculcate the wisdom which the community has learned from its communal living over the centuries: they form a folk philosophy of truisms which are a substitute among the unsophisticated for metaphysical argument. Proverbs can of course be contradictory, according as circumstances alter and the speaker's point of view varies. So we are told on the one hand that "Absence makes the heart grow fonder", and on the other "Out of sight, out of mind". Popular wisdom is invarably empirical, pragmatic, and opportunist, like that of the man whose advice to his son was, "Honesty's the best policy - I've tried baith".