Old Wives Sayings

#1. He tells old wives' tales much to the point.

Horace

#2. Someone was always leaving
and never coming back.
The wooden houses wait like old wives
along this road; they are everywhere,
abandoned, leaning, turning gray.

Lisel Mueller

#3. The old wives' tale about cold showers is false: blasting your body with a couple gallons of ice water doesn't make you any less horny. It just makes you horny and cold.

Nenia Campbell

#4. But do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years; for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#5. Pay heed to the tales of old wives. It may well be that they alone keep in memory what it was once needful for the wise to know.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#6. MIDWINTER IS THE DREARIEST of the year. Days are short, nights are long, and both are cold and wet with no immediate prospect of relief. Winter's Tail is what the old wives call it, dragging filth at winter's ass.

Ellen Kushner

#7. I adopted a healthier diet. I take at least a tablespoon of apple-cider vinegar a day. It's an old wives' tale, but it really is one of the best things you can put in your mouth.

Melissa Etheridge

#8. The universities do not teach all things ... so a doctor must seek out old wives, gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveller ... Knowledge is experience.

Paracelsus

#9. I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen.
[From a column dated November 17, 1928]

Dorothy Parker

#10. Oft it may be chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were heedful for the wise to know.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#11. Old wives' tales are not enough in a day when old wives and old men, too, are constantly moving away from their labours.

Vincent Massey

#12. Old wives' tales - that is, worthless stories, untruths, trivial gossip, a derisive label that allots the art of storytelling to women at the exact same time as it takes all value from it.

Angela Carter

#13. Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.

Theodore Dreiser

#14. Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

Charles Lamb

#15. For example, the notion that getting chilled can cause one to catch a cold is dismissed as an old wives' tale by many usually reliable sources.

Sherry Seethaler

#16. Once upon a time ... " "In the beginning was ... " That's the way it always starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives' tale blues riff begins with "Woke up this mornin' ...

Steven Tyler

#17. So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is - other people!

Jean-Paul Sartre

#18. Old wives' tales have hurt cats. They're not true! Who are those Old Wives?

Darlene Arden

#19. I'm always like, 'I can't believe I sound like my mother.' I remember running out of the house telling, 'Put your shoes on or you're going to get sick!' That's an old wives' tale, but it's like some weird mind control that I would be like that.

Eileen Davidson

#20. Right Jo better be happy old maids than unhappy wives or unmaidenly girls running about to find husbands.

Louisa May Alcott

#21. Coming from the Midwest, I didn't know about stand-up as an art. I just thought stand-up comedians were old men in suits talking about their wives.

Natasha Leggero

#22. I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing to be good.

Mark Twain

#23. Comfort for herself. Yes, she would love Logan after they were married. She could see no way for it to come about, but Nanny and the old folks had said it, so it must be so. Husbands and wives always loved each other, and that was what

Zora Neale Hurston

#24. The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other.

Andrea Dworkin

#25. Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.

Francis Bacon

#26. ... I wanted to show that the mother was the heroine as soon as possible. I'm tired of love-sick girls and runaway wives. We'll prove that there's romance in old women also.

Louisa May Alcott

#27. Wives, girlfriends, fiancees - clean out your closets. I'm cleaning out my old bell bottoms. We can touch millions.

Deion Sanders

#28. As a society, let's all strive to make "old fashioned" the "new fashion". Husbands make it clear to your wives that you are on a mission to become her knight in shining armor.

Lindsey Rietzsch

#29. A few years ago one of my wives, when talking about wives leaving their husbands said, 'I wish my husband's wives would leave him, every soul of them except myself.' That is the way they all feel, more or less, at times, both old and young.

Brigham Young

#30. Most of the leading figures of the Old Testament were polygamists. Abraham had several wives and concubines. If they wanted, they could say this was approved in the Bible.

Desmond Tutu

#31. There once was an old man of Lyme who married three wives at a time when asked, 'Why a third?' he replied 'One's absurd! and bigamy, sir, is a crime!'

William Cosmo Monkhouse

#32. And why do so many people wilfully exhaust their strength in promiscuous living, when their wives are on hand from bridal night till old age - to be taken when required, like fish from a private pond.

Ihara Saikaku

#33. Bachelors' wives and old maids' children are always perfect.

Nicolas Chamfort

#34. Not only should the conventional "rules" of marriage not apply necessarily to individual wives, but the euphoria of Phase One is old news. We being to learn that while nothing is as good as it seems, nothing is quite as dire as it appears.

Susan Shapiro Barash

#35. Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.

James Joyce

#36. She told me once she envied the women who lived back in the good old days who only had to worry about Indians and mountain lions killing their husbands. Something about those things being beyond a wife's control.

Tawni O'Dell

#37. The old equation has changed. Most families no longer save money by keeping wives at home. They lose by not having wives in the workplace, where women have more opportunities than in the past to earn decent wages.

Stephanie Coontz

#38. She's an old soldier's woman, and she has antennae for things that often escape the officer in the field.

Robert Ludlum

#39. The interesting thing about 'True Blood' is that its appeal is not contained to teenage girls. I get stopped in the street and questioned by 70-year-old men whose wives and daughters are making Bloody Marys and throwing 'True Blood' parties.

Stephen Moyer

#40. Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied.

Edith Wharton

#41. We don't woo our wives with clubs. We don't leave old folks on ice floes. And maybe the time has come to quit diving into rip tides to save people we don't know. We've outgrown a lot of survival-of-the-fittest strategies, and risking our lives for strangers might be one of them.

Christopher McDougall

#42. In 1940 I was just turning 5 years old and being taken to the movies. For those of us who were not old enough to understand the horror of war it was a very romantic era because these guys were kissing their wives and girlfriends goodbye and going off to fight and become heroes.

Woody Allen

#43. Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives; And marriage and death and division Make barren our lives.

Algernon Charles Swinburne