Chinese proverbs
Many Chinese proverbs exist, some of which have entered English in forms that are of varying degrees of faithfulness. A notable example is "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step", from the "Dao De Jing", ascribed to Laozi. They cover all aspects of life, and are widely used in everyday speech, in contrast to the decline of the use of proverbs in Western cultures. The majority are distinct from high literary forms such as xiehouyu and chengyu, and are "common sayings" of usually anonymous authorship, originating through "little tradition" rather than "great tradition". Collections  and sources. In the preface and introduction to his 1875 categorized collection of Chinese proverbs, Wesleyan missionary William Scarborough observed that there had theretofore been very few European-language works on the subject, listing John Francis Davis' 1823 "Chinese Moral Maxims", Paul Hubert Perny's 1869 "Proverbes Chinois", and Justus Doolittle's 1872 "Vocabulary and Handbook of the Chinese Language" as exhaustive on the subject to that point. He also observed that there were few collections in Chinese languages. Two such collections he named as "Chien-pên-hsien-wen", "A Book of Selected Virtuous Lore" (a.k.a. "Tsêng-huang", "Great Collection ), and the Ming-hsin-pao-chien", "A Precious Mirror to throw light on the mind". He observed that the proverbs themselves are numerous, with the whole of China probably able to supply some 20,000, a figure that modern scholars agree with. Sources of such proverbs he found in the aforementioned collections, in the "Yu-hsio" ("Youth's Instructor"), the 1859 "Chieh-jen-i", the 1707 "Chia-pao-chulan-ci" ("Complete Collection of Family Treasures"), the "Sheng-yu" ("Sacred Edict"), the "Kan-ying p'ien" ("Book of Rewards and Punishments"), and "Chutzu-chia-yen" ("The Household Rules of the Philosopher Chu"). The  modern popularity of Chinese proverbs in Chinese literature led to an explosion in the availability of dictionaries, glossaries, and studies of them in the middle to late 20th century. Definition, forms, and character. There are two set literary forms in Chinese that have been much studied: However, Chinese proverbs are primarily "not" these high literary forms, but rather the product of thousands of years of an oral culture of peasant people, often illiterate. The informal and oft-quoted proverbs of everyday conversation are largely not the sayings of Confucius, but are rather of anonymous origin. Many sayings commonly attributed to  Confucius, often in the form "Confucius said...", are not correctly attributed, or their attribution is disputed by scholars. Whilst the sayings of philosophers such as Laozi and Confucius form part of the "great tradition" (a notion introduced by Robert Redfield in 1956) amongst Chinese literati over the centuries; proverbs largely come from the "little tradition" of the overwhelming peasant majority of Chinese society. Professor of linguistics John Rosenhow of the University of Chicago characterized most such proverbs as "witty, pomposity-piercing proverbs for which peasants are famous all over the world". Scarborough observed that wit, humour, and puns can be  found in abundance. In terms of form, Scarborough tried to characterize "Su-'hua", "Common Sayings", more clearly than a metaphorical description by Alfred Lord Tennyson and by the descriptions of proverb in several contemporary dictionaries, which he stated to be inaccurate descriptions. He observed that most proverbs were couplets, which he divided into three major groups (with a smaller number of minor outliers): Rosenhow made similar observations on the difficulty of aligning Chinese proverbs with western definitions of the idea, stating that the closest equivalent Chinese term is "yanyu", which itself does not have a single meaning. Sun Zhiping's 1982  definition of "yanyu" (translated and recounted by Rosenhow) is "complete sentences, expressing a judgement or an inference, [which] may be used to validate [or to] represent [one's] own [individual] views, [whereas] "chenyu", "xieouyu", and "suyu" generally can only serve as parts of a sentence, [and are] used to give a concrete description of expression of the quality, state, degree, etc. of some objective material phenomenon". Rosenhow notes however that some sentence fragments also fall within the category of Chinese proverbs, with ellipsis accounting for their fragmentary natures, and that a better definition is the "purpose" of Chinese proverbs, which  is morally instructional; informing people what to do in a given situation by reference to familiar ideas, and repeatedly used in conversation in order to promote and continue a shared set of values and ways of going about things. Influence. Numerous Asian proverbs, in particular, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean ones, appear to be derived from older Chinese proverbs, although in often is impossible to be completely sure about the direction of cultural influences (and hence, the origins of a particular proverb or idiomatic phrase). Falsely ascribed origin. In English, various phrases are used and claimed to be of Chinese origin  – "..., as they say in China" or "An ancient Chinese proverb says...", and may be specifically attributed to Confucius, sometimes facetiously. Notable examples include: Modern popularity. The widespread use of Chinese proverbs in everyday speech, even in the 21st century, contrasts with the decline of the use of proverbs in Western cultures. As stated earlier, they have historically been a part of a long-standing oral culture amongst the Chinese peasantry, and their continued existence in an age of more widespread literacy and written communication is explained by the political events in China of the 20th century. One factor was the  May 4th Movement not only encouraging vernacular language over Literary Chinese but at the same time including proverbs into modern Chinese literature, exemplified by Cheng Wangdao's inclusion of popular sayings in the chapter on quotations in his 1932 "Introduction to Rhetoric" and by the parting admonition to writers in Hu Shih's 1917 "Tentative suggestions for Literary Reform": "Do not avoid popular expressions." The Potato School of writing even required the use of proverbs. Another factor was the deliberate use of proverbs as a rhetorical technique by leaders such as Mao Zedong addressing primarily peasant audiences. Mao encouraged others  to do the same as he himself did, in his 1942 Talks on Literature and Art at the Yan'an Forum, stressing to writers the importance of the use of folk idioms and proverbs in order to make their writing accessible to the majority of their audience. Parallels to English proverbs. Scarborough noted that there are many proverbs with parallels to European ones, including: "Too many cooks spoil the broth," with the parallel "Seven hands and eight feet," "a pig in a poke" with the parallel "a cat in a bag," and "When in Rome, do as the Romans do," with  Wherever you go, talk as the people of the place talk.