Pagan Proverbs

Over at Goddessing, the question was raised, "Are there any pagan proverbs?"

Because I see myself as a pagan constructionist, as opposed to a pagan reconstructionist, I find myself having to create my own proverbs. Sometimes, I find they have been referenced by others; and often in surprising ways. Because I also think as a poet, often the distillation of a thought that is required to create poetry results in aphorisms or pithy memorable quips that can serve as proverbs. Many have found such memorable lines in my work (often to my surprise), such as the Druid Animal Sonnets, which I wrote to clarify in my own mind the lengthy text provided by Phillip Carr-Gomm in his Druid Animal Oracle.

Others come upon me quite by chance, like the line: "We are not lost in these woods, nor are they lost in us", which describes my feeling about Druidry. I think part of what is lacking in Paganism is a sense of liturgy (which would include scripture, proverbs and hymns). Often the rituals are obscure, or overly complex, and do not directly connect the observer to the observed. As a result, there doesn't seem to be the immediacy and connection between the mundane and magickal that devices, such as proverbs, offer other religious practioners.

Some suggested pagan proverbs might be:
"There is no mundane"

or Gandhi's famous quote:
"You must be the change you wish to see"

or to borrow from St. Exupery (and I seem to be doing that a lot lately):
"What is essential is invisible to the eye"

I would also think that the Irish triads, and probably the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, qualify as pagan proverbs.

The problem is that there is not a single stream of "pagan" tradition. By its very nature, each tradition is more or less insular, and relies upon its own particular history for its inspiration. In some cases, that history is convoluted at best; in others, there really is NO history to speak of, or that history has been, to some extent, invented. But certainly there are many primary and secondary sources that contain pearls of wisdom that could be thought of as proverbs.