He that revealeth his secret maketh himself a slave.
Meaning: Sharing confidences surrenders your autonomy, granting others leverage over your privacy and decisions.
Origin: Recorded in A Dictionary of English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, an undated collection published in London by Whittaker & Co. around 1880 and credited to Thomas Preston. Its earlier history hasn't been traced.
More proverbs about Wisdom
- Catch not at the shadow and lose the substance. — Pursuing trivial distractions causes you to forfeit what truly matters and holds real val…
- The finest shoe often hurts the foot. — Beauty and perfection in appearance frequently come at the cost of comfort and practical…
- God tempers the wind to the shorn sheep. — Hardship diminishes in proportion to one's vulnerability, or mercy matches misfortune.
- Short and sweet like a donkey's gallop. — Brief moments of intensity fade quickly, so appreciate their value without expecting perm…
- Every one can tame a shrew but he that hath her. — Only those outside a difficult relationship can judge or manage it; those within suffer i…
- Few people are out of the reach of slander. — Most individuals lack sufficient obscurity or virtue to escape false accusations and mali…
From our tongue twisters
- Stół z powyłamywanymi nogami. — Six words, almost no vowels — a single noun phrase that non-Polish speakers find impossib…
- 四是四，十是十，十四是十四，四十是四十。(Sì shì sì, shí shì shí, shísì shì shísì, sìshí shì sìshí.) — A pure sì/shí tone drill — the two numbers are near-identical and the tones swap each tim…
- 吃葡萄不吐葡萄皮，不吃葡萄倒吐葡萄皮。(Chī pútao bù tǔ pútao pí, bù chī pútao dào tǔ pútao pí.) — A 'pú/tǔ/pí' drill with reversing logic — the negations flip the meaning as the tongue tr…