Famous quotes containing the words english proverb, seventeenth-century english and/or english:
“The difference is wide that the sheets will not decide.”
—English proverb, collected in John Ray, English Proverbs (1670)
“A degenerate nobleman is like a turnip. There is nothing good of him but that which is underground.”
—Seventeenth-century English saying.
“Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)