Proportion your expenses to what you have, not to what you expect.
Meaning: Spending based on current resources prevents financial ruin when anticipated income or gains fail to materialize.
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
- Experience is a dear school, but it is the only one we are apt to learn in. — Costly mistakes teach us what lectures cannot: wisdom requires personal suffering to beco…
- Better one eye than quite blind. — Partial knowledge or capability, however limited, surpasses complete deprivation.
- One may sooner fall than rise. — Damage spreads faster than repairs; decline requires less effort than recovery.
- Under water famine, under snow bread. — Hidden abundance often lies beneath apparent scarcity; adversity conceals resources invis…
- Fancy may bolt bran and think it flour. — Imagination can disguise inferior things as valuable when we fail to examine them closely.
- You may go farther and fare worse. — Pursuing distant goals risks worse outcomes than accepting present imperfect circumstance…
From our tongue twisters
- Der Cottbuser Postkutscher putzt den Cottbuser Postkutschkasten. — A jaw-breaking compound-noun 'ts/tsch/sch' marathon — the German love of compound words w…
- Hinter Hermann Hannes Haus hängen hundert Hemden raus. — A relentless 'h' aspirate drill — every word opens with the same breathy attack.
- Tigre contro tigre, tigre contro un'altra tigre. — Pure 't/ig/re' drill — short and merciless; the double-g demands a crisp Italian stop.