Produced by Bill Tozier, Barbara Tozier and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net BOOK OF WISE SAYINGS _SELECTED LARGELY FROM EASTERN SOURCES_ BY W. A. CLOUSTON _Author of “Popular Tales and Fictions,” “Literary Coincidences, and other Papers,” “Flowers from a Persian Garden,” etc._ “Concise sentences, like darts, fly abroad and make impressions, while long discourses are tedious and not regarded.”—BACON. “Many are the sayings of the wise, In ancient and in modern books enrolled.”—MILTON. LONDON PUBLISHED BY HUTCHINSON & CO. AT 34 PATERNOSTER ROW 1893 PRINTED AT NIMEGUEN (HOLLAND) BY H. C. A. THIEME OF NIMEGUEN (HOLLAND) AND TALBOT HOUSE, ARUNDEL STREET LONDON, W.C. TO FRANCIS THORNTON BARRETT, CHIEF LIBRARIAN, MITCHELL LIBRARY, GLASGOW, THIS LITTLE BOOK, WITH FRIENDLY GREETINGS, IS INSCRIBED. PREFACE. Cynics may ask, how many have profited by the innumerable proverbs and maxims of prudence which have been current in the world time out of mind? They will say that their only use is to repeat them after some unhappy wight has “gone wrong.” When, for instance, a man has played “ducks and drakes” with his money, the fact at once calls up the proverb which declares that “wilful waste leads to woful want”; but did not the “waster” know this well-worn saying from his early years _downwards_? What good, then, did it do him? Again, how many have been benefited by the saying of the ancient Greek poet, that “evil communications corrupt good manners”?—albeit they had it frequently before them in their school “copy-books.” Are the maxims of morality useless, then, because they are so much disregarded?