Scattered through the old anthologies is a trove of one-line sayings — proverbs the Rabbis handed down the way other peoples pass down songs. The 1901 collection Hebraic Literature preserves a cluster of them, most drawn from the Talmud and minor Midrashim, each tight enough to live in the mouth.
"The house which opens not to the poor will open to the physician." Miserliness is not saving; it is deferred payment. "The birds of the air despise a miser." "Hospitality is an expression of Divine worship" — a teaching the Talmud (Shabbat 127a) roots in Abraham's decision to leave even the Shekhinah standing to welcome three travelers.
On speech and discretion: "Your friend has a friend, and your friend's friend has a friend — be discreet." On shame: "Do not place a blemish on your own flesh." On business: "Attend no auctions if you have no money." On work: "Rather skin a carcass for pay in the public streets than lie idly dependent on charity" — a line from the Talmud (Bava Batra 110a) that became a lodestar for how Jews have thought about labor for nearly two thousand years.
On partnership: "Deal with those who are fortunate." On acceptance: "What is intended for your neighbor will never be yours." On vulnerability: "The weakness of your walls invites the burglar." On humility: "The place does not honor the man; it is the man who gives honor to the place." "The humblest man is ruler in his own house." On realism about power: "If the fox is king, bow before him."
And on silence, the hardest discipline: "If a word spoken in its time is worth one piece of money, silence in its time is worth two." One last dry line: "Tobias committed the sins and his neighbor received the punishment" — a proverb about the unfairness the world sometimes hands out, with no tidy resolution offered.
Read all at once, these proverbs are a miniature ethics. Open your door. Work honestly. Watch your tongue. Bow when you must. Know that one day your silence will be worth more than your speech.