Wit and Wisdom in Morocco (1931)

A study of native proverbs. This book completes Westermarck’s trilogy on the customs and ideas of the Moors, which is based on nine years’ experience among them in the course of more than three decades. A large number of the proverbs found in this volume are sentences conveying a statement of a more or less general character which is either literally or metaphorically applicable to individual cases; but the statement of some particular event, real or imaginary, may also be a proverb, though only on condition that it may be figuratively applied to other events reminiscent of it. Proverbs have become proverbs only by being used in definite concrete situations.