Life & Wisdom Quote by James Howell

There is a sly bit of democratic flattery in Howell's line, and an equally sly bit of elitist management. Calling proverbs "the philosophy of the common people" elevates folk speech into something like a public library of wisdom: compressed, portable, practical. In a 17th-century England racked by religious conflict, civil war, and rapid social churn, that portability matters. Systems break; sayings survive. A proverb is a tool you can carry when institutions, sermons, and scholarly authorities feel contested or remote.

Howell's phrasing does double work. "May not improperly be called" is a writerly hedge that signals he knows he's trespassing on the territory of formal philosophy, then calmly grants the crowd a license to enter. It's generous, but also cautious: the educated observer remains the one handing out credentials. The subtext is that popular wisdom isn't random; it's a collective method for making sense of scarcity, risk, and power. "Measure twice, cut once" is epistemology dressed as carpentry.

The intent is also literary. Howell, a compiler and commentator, is defending the cultural value of what can look like mere cliche. Proverbs are the working person's archive: they encode norms, warnings, and social bargaining chips ("a stitch in time" is as much about moral discipline as sewing). At the same time, Howell hints at the limits of that archive. Proverbs often contradict each other, because common life does. Their "philosophy" isn't a system; it's a pile of survival strategies, refined by repetition and made authoritative by anonymity.