"The Elizabethans"--now that's classy. And we have a motto: "De gackibus non disputandem." Next: a flag. Any designers among us?

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

From my wife's rural Pennsylvania uprbinging comes this aphorism:
"I despaired of having no shoes until I met a man with no feet."

At first I didn't know in which direction John was taking the Sandbox with his "Queenerisms."

It would be interesting to go through the thousands of blog posts to find great one-liners from both the commentators and the Queen BA herself.

I've composed the Queen's Fanfare and I shall begin work on the D@L Anthem.

John, you should join us at Kooper's on Saturday ...

I thought "Queenerisms" was going to be a reference to Her Majesty, Queen Liz of the Blog. There have certainly been equally pithy comments from OMG and the Porkster alone to fill a book.

Here's a quasi food related one for you...

Don't s _ _ t where you eat.

That first one is very similar to the old, "Some days your the statue, some days you're the pigeon."

For a flag emblem, maybe a crossed knife and fork?

I'm pretty sure B. Franklin already did this. That said: Great minds run in the same gutter.

John, how bout "Some days you're the bug, some days you're the windshield."

My dad's: 'There he goes pulling his as* again.'

I never understood the association but it meant unwarranted bragging. The as* was not the animal but the anatomical part.

This has the potential to be the funniest D&L thread in history. I'll steal a line from the movie Sweet Home Alabama. "You can't ride two horses with one ass"

My late grandmother had a number of these, one of which I'll share here as it is directly related to food: "If we had ham we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs."

Two wrongs don't make a right, but two rights make a U-turn.

Flipkid srote: Two wrongs don't make a right, but two rights make a U-turn.

And three rights make a left.

And: If at first you don't succeed, skydiving might not be for you.

Yeah, I see a book coming together.
I gravitate most to the likes of Regina's offering. the beauty of Queenerisms (named for Bob Queener, late of the FBI and another three-letter company which shall go nameless) is that, if said with enough enthusiasm or confidence, they sounded wise. But upon closer inspection, they were puzzling. One-line parables: perhaps that's the best way I can describe them. Another Queenerism, that I've puzzled over for years: "It takes an awfully large dog to make a ton."

Why didn't you put that in the original post? I love that. It has a Zen-y, koan quality. EL

The Queenerism to wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one gets filled first was recited to me by my mother Yiddish when I was "wishing" for some thing. She translated in English with spit being replaced with a word that rhymed with wish. I don't remember her ever going to Kentucky.

Concerning wishes: People in Hell want ice water.

Or for use after a cross-country trip with a no longer child person: Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

My Dad who was a youngster during the first Great Depression stated whenever I did something dumb (which was frequent) "Wise up the railroad is hiring."He never explained it and I still have no idea what it means.

The most useful one I've heard in my life, from a co-worker's great aunt:

Some people you have to feed with a long-handled spoon

One of my mother's phrases was:
I am going to see a man about a dog.
This was recited whenever we inquired about where she was going and she did not want to tell us.

My father's favorite reply to any question he felt didn't deserve a serious reply was "Either that or a ham sandwich". I never quite understood it, but I still smile when I think about him saying it.

JL: Excellent title - "One-line Parables" especially considering that a parable is meant to convey a moral truth.

My dad would say "I used to complain that I had no shoes until I saw a man who had no feet."

For Michael A.Gray and Piano Rob -- I recall Lily Tomlin's variation on that aphorism: "I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no rhythm."