Na wszystko jest przysłowie – z warsztatu badacza-edytora literatury polskiego oświecenia

The starting point of the paper is the thesis about the necessity of contrasting an old literary text with the records in paremiographic collections in the course of works on explanations for the critical edition of a didactic and scientific character. This type of search query may assist in solving numerous ambiguities of Enlightenment works saturated with sentences of an aphoristic nature. Above all, it allows for a thorough linguistic analysis of individual texts, the study of language competence of their authors and, in a broader sense, the study of the literature of this era in terms of the manner in which it is rooted in tradition and in terms of the patterns of language use. The paper is an attempt to systematise the examples of proverbs incorporated into literary texts of the 18th c. Individual types of practices were illustrated with quotations from the representative poetic and dramatic works of this age.