Source: Translations, Monkey: Folk Novel of China (1942), Ch. 27 (p. 266)
“It cannot be told by the words of the mouth, it cannot be written on paper”
Songs of Kabîr (1915)
Context: He comes to the Path of the Infinite on whom the grace of the Lord descends: he is freed from births and deaths who attains to Him.
Kabîr says: "It cannot be told by the words of the mouth, it cannot be written on paper: It is like a dumb person who tastes a sweet thing — how shall it be explained?"
“3273. Look not a given Horse in the Mouth.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“Never look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Noli equi dentes inspicere donati.
On the Epistle to the Ephesians
Commentaries, New Testament
“He always looked a given horse in the mouth.”
Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Gargantua (1534), Chapter 11.
“No man ought to looke a given horse in the mouth.”
Part I, chapter 5.
Proverbs (1546), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Ein Mensch wie ich kann ohne Steckenpferd, ohne herrschende Leidenschaften, ohne einen Tyrannen in Schillers Worten, nicht leben. Ich habe meinen Tyrannen gefunden und in seinem Dienst kenne ich kein Maß.
Letter to Wilhelm Fliess (1895), as quoted in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Vol 3-4 (1967) p. 159
1890s
Context: A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.
“He ne'er consider'd it, as loth
To look a gift-horse in the mouth.”
Canto I, line 490
Source: Hudibras, Part I (1663–1664)
1840s, Past and Present (1843)
12 February 1851; compare the remark of John Wilkes about Samuel Johnson, "Liberty is as ridiculous in his mouth as Religion in mine" (20 March 1778), quoted in The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) by James Boswell.
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)
