English in everyday life
Proverbs
Explore English sayings from most to least frequent in a published American English corpus. Alternate forms are collected together.
About these frequency groups
Groups use full-form occurrence counts in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), recorded in 2016–2017. For a proverb with several forms, we use the highest individual count, since adding overlapping forms could count the same occurrence twice.
These are historical American English corpus counts, not estimates of how often everyone uses a saying today. A zero means no full-form match was recorded. The source’s separate familiarity ratings are retained in the data but do not determine this ordering.
We grouped variants, merged reviewed duplicate entries, and preserved existing editorial wording. The source includes historical and dated sayings; inclusion is not an endorsement.
Expressions containing life, including its inflections. Clear word filter
68 entries
Most common
100 or more recorded occurrences
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Such is life
Life sucks
Live life to the fullest
Your money or your life!
Life is unfair
The best things in life are free
Life's a bitch
Where there's life, there's hope
Variety is the spice of life
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
The life you save may be your own
Life is a gamble
Life is what you make it
Today is the first day of the rest of your life
Happy wife, happy life
Life has its ups and downs
Life is a journey, not a destination
Into each life some rain must fall
Life begins at 40
Life is like a box of chocolates
Life is what happens while you are making other plans
In the midst of life we are in death
It's a great life if you don't weaken
Nothing in life is simple
Some things you can't change
Matching variant: Some things in life you can't change