Hard cryptograms

Where to start on a hard cryptogram

Nothing is given on these and the sayings are short, which means frequency counting will not save you: in twenty words the letter distribution is too small to trust. What still holds is structure, so work from the shape of words rather than their letters.

Find the shortest word and enumerate. Test A and I on any single letter, then use what that forces elsewhere. Look for a word with a repeated symbol in a distinctive pattern: a five-letter word shaped ABABA or ABCCB narrows to a handful of candidates. Then check your guess against the whole text, because a substitution must hold everywhere. One contradiction means the guess is wrong, and finding it early is worth more than being right slowly.

Whatever you try, remember the rule that makes the puzzle finite: one symbol stands for one letter throughout, and no two symbols share a letter. If a guess forces the same plain letter into two different symbols, it is wrong regardless of how well it reads.