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 nothing, including its inflections. Clear word filter
42 entries
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Nothing is impossible
You ain't seen nothing yet
Nothing lasts forever
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself
Matching variant: Nothing is terrible except fear itself
Nothing ventured, nothing gained
Nothing succeeds like success
There is nothing new under the sun
You can't beat something with nothing
Nothing comes easy
You don't get something for nothing
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
Anything is better than nothing
Goodness had nothing to do with it
Nothing is certain but death and taxes
There is nothing to fear but fear itself
Nothing comes from nothing
There is nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos
It costs nothing to look
Power concedes nothing without a demand
It costs nothing to ask
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
Nothing in life is simple
Nothing is as simple as it seems
If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything
Matching variant: If you stand for nothing, you will fall for anything
Plans are nothing, planning is everything
When in doubt, do nothing
When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used