More wit and wisdom from the Albanians

Today I am bringing you another selection of what can only be called Albanian proverbs. These are different from the proverbs we are used to. Our proverbs are normally flimsy at first sight and then turn out to have deep sense and staying power. Albanian proverbs sound pretty thoughtful at first hearing, but fade away the longer you think about them.

Try them. You won't regret it.

Give a dog a bad name, and everyone will want to buy one as a guard dog.

There is one thing called a tea spoon and another thing called a coffee spoon, but what is the difference? Especially as they are both, in fact, milk spoons?

Nobody can ever think of the name of a Portuguese composer off the top of his head.

An empty notebook is not an empty notebook. It is already full of such things as pages and lines. The only thing missing from an "empty" notebook is human stupidity.

At the end of a concert, the man who gets all the applause is the only man in the orchestra who has not played a note of music all evening.

What children need is not more sex education, of which they have quite enough already, but more love education, of which they probably get none at all.

Information technology is a branch of human knowledge which says at the outset that a rigid square object is a "floppy disk" and that a soft bit of paper is "hard copy". No wonder it is not universally trusted.

In a country which has 100 per cent illiteracy, there is no problem with graffiti.

When two left-handed people meet, which hands do they shake?

It was not until man had perfected the invention of clear window glass that he set to work to invent a kind of glass you couldn't see through - frosted glass.

Whether an artist pegs out young, or survives to a grand old age, he always manages to die exactly a hundred years before his centenary.

Nobody ever found a message in a hip flask.

If the Great Wall of China is really the only man-made object that is visible on Earth from the moon, what is it that makes London invisible?

In what language did Latin families write their family mottoes?

It is not necessary to bribe a jockey to lose a race. In any race, the majority of jockeys will lose anyway, despite the fact that they are all being paid to win.

Nobody has ever induced a bubble to go downwards.

When opening a dictionary, you never go straight to the word you want to look up.

The only journalist who can be trusted is the one who tells the truth about his expenses.

First fizzy water was called "fizzy water". Then it was called "naturally carbonated water". Now it is called "sparkling water". But still water has always been called "still water".

Nobody ever sees a waiter trying to catch a diner's eye.

There was no such thing in nature as a weed, until man came on the scene and designated certain wild flowers as weeds.

From the viewpoint of any species but man, Homo sapiens is the worst weed on our planet.

What is the opposite of a full moon? What is the opposite of an upright piano? What is the opposite of widow's weeds?