Proverbs are metaphorical expressions that are passed down from generation to generation, expressing common shared experiences and folk wisodm serving as advice for life. Proverbs are closely related to culture and tradition and therefore differ between languages. Many proverbs come from folk tales, religion and literature. Although English, Croatian and German do not have much in common other than being Indo-European languages, they share a considerable amount of proverbs that appear in the same syntactic and lexical form and have the same meaning. Proverbs are characterized by a fixed structure. The aim of this thesis was to analyze the modifications of proverbs in English, Croatian and German by examining their occurrence in the corpus. Internet corpora available through the Sketch Engine platform were used for this research. The research shows the ways in which proverbs change in the corpus, what are their possible variations, which parts of the proverb are most prone to change, and which remain relatively unchanged. The aim was to determine how flexible these three languages are when it comes to modifying proverbs. It was examined, for example, whether it is possible to replace a lexical unit in a proverb, such as a noun, and if so, which are these nouns. The resulting variations were compared in these three languages while focusing on proverbs that have the same meaning and structure in English, Croatian and German. The research showed that the structure of proverbs is not as fixed as its definitions suggest.