Seventeenth-century English Proverb

Famous quotes containing the words english proverb, seventeenth-century english and/or english:

“The shortest answer is doing.”
—English proverb, collected in George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum (1651)

“A degenerate nobleman is like a turnip. There is nothing good of him but that which is underground.”
—Seventeenth-century English saying.

“But it was alway yet the trick of our English nation, if they
have a good thing, to make it too common.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)