An in-depth contrastive study on two paremiological internationalisms, A rolling stone gathers no moss and The cowl does not make the monk, and their equivalents in French, Spanish and Italian, reveals their similarities and differences. Only by contrasting equivalent proverbs in diachronic and synchronic corpora can one retrace their formal and semantic development but also their frequency of use. Extralinguistic cultural changes and developments in societies have a direct impact on how modern speakers interpret traditional proverbs, whose original meaning may evolve as much as to even acquire the opposite sense that was common and generally accepted in ancient or medieval times.