Enjoy dozens of witty and insightful Iranian proverbs and idioms that have been passed down from one generation to the next for hundreds of years!
- Little by little, the wool becomes a carpet.
- If you really have to sin, then choose a sin that you enjoy.
- Forgiveness hides a pleasure that you can’t get back from revenge.
- He is still alive because he cannot afford a funeral.
- The arrow that has left the bow never returns.
- I gave so much advice that hair grew on my tongue.
- Necessity can change a lion into a fox.
- Women are just like cats: they always land on their feet.
- A greedy man is always poor.
- While yearning for excess, we lose the necessities.
- Woe is he who claims to have found happiness.
- When fate strikes, physicians are useless.
- A man without a child is a king without sorrows.
- Every fault that a sultan pleases can be a quality.
- Use your enemy’s hand to catch a snake.
- It is nothing for one to know something, unless another knows you know it.
- You cannot hang everything on one nail.
- A wise man can laugh at his jokes.
- For his master, the dog is a lion.
- He gives a party with bathwater.
- Once a friend, always a friend.
- Who has not had a taste longs to do so, but for whom has tasted, then the longing is a hundred times more.
- There are three things that have to be done quickly: burying the dead, opening the door for a stranger, and fixing your daughter’s wedding.
- Every man is the king of his own beard.
- Where the camel is sold for a cent, the ass is worthless.
- Thinking well is wise; planning well, wiser; but doing well is the wisest and best of all.
- I can only get better if I have good friends.
- The mud that you throw will fall on your own head.
- Work is twice done by the man in a hurry.
- The guard’s sleep is the lamplight of the thief.
- The drowning man is not troubled by rain.
- To sin in secret is more pleasant than having pleasure in the open.
- Credit is better than wealth.
- If you fall into a pit, providence is under no obligation to come and look for you.
- Sometimes, the body becomes healthy by being very sick.
- The earth is a host who kills his guests.
- A man can pose as wise when searching for wisdom, but if he believes to have found it, is a fool.
- You only appreciate your father the day you become a father yourself.
- Flies will never leave the shop of a sweet maker.
- The loveliest faces are to be seen by moonlight, when one sees half with the eye and half with the fancy.
- Only a heart can find the way to another heart.
- Expect trust from a dog but not from a woman.
- Beware a rickety wall, a savage dog, and a quarrelsome person.
- A blind man who sees is better than a sighted man who is blind.
- The best memory is that which forgets nothing, but injuries.
- You don’t put a wooden pot on the fire twice.
- Flies will easily fly into the honey; their problem is how to get out.
- He who has been bitten by a snake fears a piece of string.
- I eat what others have planted, and I plant what others want to eat.
- I have no right to rejoice at the death of my enemy when I do not have eternal life myself.
For thousands more proverbs and words of wisdom, collected from over 40 countries, check out Proverbs from Around the World!