Promising mountains of gold. [ Ter ]

Promising is the eve of giving. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Between promising and performing, a man may marry his daughter. [ Proverb ]

Before promising a woman to love only her, one should have seen them all, or should see only her. [ A. Dupuy ]

To the warning word no man has respect, only to the flattering and promising is his attention directed. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Promising is the very air of the time; it opens the eyes of expectation: performance is ever the duller for his act; and, but in the plainer and simpler kind of people, the deed of saying is quite out of use. To promise is most courtly and fashionable; performance is a kind of will, or testament, which argues a great sickness in his judgment that makes it. [ William Shakespeare ]

The habit of exaggeration in language should be guarded against; it misleads the credulous and offends the perceptive; it imposes on us the society of a balloon, when a moderately-sized skull would fill the place much better; it begets much evil in promising what it cannot perform, and we have often found the most glowing declarations of intended good services end in mere Irish vows. [ Eliza Cook ]