બેઠક A place to sit and hear them again.

A bethak is where people sit together and talk. That is all this is — 1234 Gujarati sayings, written down, with what they mean in English.

Why

Most people who grew up around Gujarati elders carry a few dozen of these around without ever having seen one written. You know the shape of it and roughly when it gets said. What you don't have is the spelling, or a way to look one up, or an answer when someone asks what it actually means.

The rest of the internet is not much help. There are listicles of thirty sayings with no sources, and one good closed dictionary. Nothing you can search in Roman letters, reuse, or check.

Where they came from

All 1234 are from Gujarati Wikiquote, used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Being on Wikiquote is itself a useful filter: these are sayings people still actually use, not only ones preserved in old books.

Four public-domain printed collections are being digitised to go much further — chiefly આશારામ દલીચંદ શાહ's ગુજરાતી કહેવત સંગ્રહ (1923), roughly 6,600 numbered entries with regional variants, the incidents behind them, Sanskrit ancestry, and Shah's own English equivalents. He died in 1921, so the work is public domain.

How to spell it in Roman letters

Every saying carries an ISO 15919 transliteration, generated from the Gujarati by a fixed rule set — no guessing involved. A looser phonetic version drives the search and the web addresses, so typing panch finds pāṁca.

What has not been checked

The English was written by a machine and nobody has reviewed it. 1220 of 1234 have a translation; the rest are waiting. A translation that reads confidently can still be wrong, and on a page like this you would have no way of telling. Every entry links to its source so you can check it yourself.

Where the sense genuinely wasn't clear, the entry says so rather than inventing something. Fourteen sit like that at the moment.

Take it

Proverb text is CC BY-SA 4.0 — reuse it freely, credit Gujarati Wikiquote, share alike. The whole collection is a single JSON file in the repository.