Valour that parleys is near yielding.
Meaning: Hesitation to fight signals weakness; true courage acts decisively without negotiation or delay.
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
- Venture a small fish to catch a great one. — Small sacrifices or risks are worthwhile investments when they lead to substantially grea…
- Venture not all in one ship. — Spreading your resources across multiple ventures protects you from total loss when disas…
- Vice is nourished by being concealed. — Secrecy allows wrongdoing to grow unchecked, while exposure and accountability naturally…
- The sweetest wine makes the sharpest vinegar. — Excellence corrupted becomes more destructive than mediocrity ever could.
- The worth of a thing is best known by the want of it. — Deprivation reveals true value; we recognize importance only through loss or scarcity.
- For want of a nail the shoe is lost; for want of a shoe the horse is lost; for want of a horse the rider is lost. — Small negligences compound catastrophically; ignoring minor problems cascades into comple…
From our untranslatable words
- Razliubit — To fall out of love — the process of ceasing to love someone you once loved, leaving behi…
- Mamihlapinatapai — The look between two people who both want the same thing but neither is willing to initia…
- Ubuntu — The philosophy that a person is a person only through other people — humanity expressed t…