catch more flies with honey than vinegar, one can

One can accom- plish more by being nice than by being nasty. A version of this term appears in Cervantes’s Don Quixote (“Make yourself into honey and the flies will devour you”), and a more precise version appears about 100 years later, in Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia: “More Flies are taken with a Drop of Honey than a Tun of Vinegar.” It is a proverb in most European languages.