Perfect Tense Examples (Proverbs and Quotations)

Proverbs

Note the use of the Present Perfect Tense in the following proverbs and sayings.

1. It is too late to lock the stable after the horse has bolted.
2. Who has never tasted bitter, knows not what is sweet.
3. The cow knows not what her tail is worth until she has lost it.
4. We know not what is good until we have lost it.
5. When children stand quiet they have done something ill.
6. Don’t sell the bear’s skin before you have caught the bear.
7. Every oak has been an acorn.
8. Drink as you have brewed.
9. Wine has drowned more men than the sea. (Bacchus has drowned more men than Neptune.)
10. A thief passes for a gentleman when stealing has made him rich.
11. A lot of water has run under the bridge.
12. Life is what you make of it. Always has been, always will be.
13. Success has brought many to destruction.

Quotations

Comment on  the meaning of the Present Tense in the following quotations.

1. She who has never loved has never lived. (John Gay)
2. He who has never hoped can never despair. (George Bernard Shaw)
3. It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are the most important. (Arthur Conan Doyle)
4. You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art. (Benjamin Disraeli)
5. A man who has not read Homer is like a man who has not seen the ocean. There is a great object of which he has no idea. (Walter Bagehot)
6. I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. (Jane Austen)
7. The phrase “unconscious humour” is the one contribution I have made to the current literature of the day. (Samuel Butler)
8. An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from a which life has departed. (S. Butler)
9. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
10. I know what you have done I know how hard you have worked. (Revelation 2:2)
11. I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze. (Horace)
12. You have hit the nail on the head. (Plautus)
13. He who has begun has half done. (Homer)
14. But what experience and history teach is this, that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history. (G. W. Hegel)
15. No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come. (Victor Hugo)
16. I regret often that I have spoken, never that I have been silent. (P. Syrus)
17. I am a part of all that I have met. (Alfred Tennyson)
18. Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow? (A. Einstein)
19. Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. (Mark Twain)
20. If you can visualize a bulldog which has just been kicked in the ribs and had its dinner sneaked by the cat, you will have Hildebrand Glossop as he now stood before me.
    "I've been through hell, Bertie."
    "Through where?"
    "Hell."
    "Oh, hell? And what took you there?"
    (Right Ho, Jeeves, P. G. Wodehouse)
21. It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo. (Cocktail Time, P. G. Wodehouse)
22. As soon as man, expert from time, has found The key of life, it opens the gates of death. (Edward Young)

• Go to the 'Perfect Tenses' page