Abstract
The paper is focused on grammatical, stylistic and structural differences between Czech proverbs used at the present and the 593 proverbs recorded in the collection of proverbs collected by J. A.
Komenský (John A. Comenius) during more than four decades before his death in 1670.
Different frequencies of grammatical categories such as the comparative and superlative in adjectives and adverbs, or the 2nd person forms in verbs, can be quoted as examples of differences pointing to more general characteristics (in this case, the fact that the 17th-century proverbs were generally more evaluative and imperative than their modern counterparts).