Quotes That Get Cut Short
15 Sayings and How They End in the Original

Some sayings travel better in pieces. A line from a poem, a play or a sermon gets shorter each time it is repeated. In the end, the half that gave it its meaning is gone.

Other sayings go the opposite way. A “full version” starts to circulate, with a second line that sounds older and wiser than the first. It turns out to be a later addition.

Each saying below gets a verdict on one specific claim about where it comes from or how it ends. The verdict is never on whether the saying itself is wise or true.

Each is set against the original text: the poem, the play, the book or the proverb collection, read in a public-domain edition or a scan of the original. Where a date comes from someone else’s search of old newspapers, the page says whose.

Some cut-short lines are already covered on other pages, so they are linked here rather than repeated.

• “Money is the root of all evil” and “Pride comes before a fall” are both trimmed Bible verses. Did They Really Say That? Part 2 covers them, and “Blood is thicker than water” too.

• “The ends justify the means” is not in The Prince. See Machiavelli: what The Prince actually says.

• On “Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one”: every early use we found of the first part is a put-down. See What Is a Renaissance Man?.

Lines that lost their second half

1. “Knowledge is power”

Partly The words are Bacon’s, but they did not begin as a motto. They began as an aside in a passage about God.

Bacon’s Meditationes Sacrae were published in 1597, in the same volume as his Essays.

In the meditation on heresies, Bacon criticises people who give God’s knowledge a wider range than God’s power. He then puts it more exactly: a wider range to the part of God’s power by which God knows than to the part by which he works and acts.

In brackets he adds the famous phrase: “for knowledge itself is power”. That is the English of James Spedding’s 1859 edition. The Latin reads nam et ipsa scientia potestas est. So in Bacon’s own writing, the famous three words began as a bracketed remark in an argument about theology.

Bacon did connect human knowledge with human power elsewhere. His Novum Organum came out in 1620. Its third aphorism begins, in Joseph Devey’s translation: “Knowledge and human power are synonymous”. The reason it gives: if you do not know the cause, you cannot bring about the effect.

The tidy Latin form, scientia potentia est, is Thomas Hobbes’s, and it has its own second half. In the Latin Leviathan of 1668 he writes Scientia potentia est; sed parva. In our translation: knowledge is power, but a small one. His English Leviathan of 1651 makes the same point: “The Sciences, are small Power; because not eminent”.

2. “A little learning is a dangerous thing”

Holds up The line goes on, and it tells you to learn more, not less. It is from Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism, first published in 1711. This is how the first edition reads.

A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring: There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.

The Pierian spring stands for learning and poetry. Pieria was, a later edition’s notes explain, the native country of the Muses. The danger Pope describes is a small amount of learning, and his cure is a larger one.

The popular version also swaps learning for knowledge. Phrase Finder reports that swap in a magazine of 1774, already credited to Pope.

3. “The proof is in the pudding”

Holds up It is short for “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”. William Camden’s collection of English proverbs, in the 1623 edition of his Remaines, has it as “All the proofe of a pudding is in the eating”.

Here proof means a test, as in a proving ground. So the proverb says that you find out whether a dish is good by eating it. Cut down to “the proof is in the pudding”, it no longer says how the testing is done.

4. “Ignorance is bliss”

Holds up It is cut from a longer line by Thomas Gray. His Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College was written in 1742 and published in 1747. It watches the schoolboys at play, heedless of their fate, and then lists the troubles waiting for them as adults. It ends:

Yet ah! why should they know their fate? Since sorrow never comes too late, And happiness too swiftly flies. Thought would destroy their paradise. No more; where ignorance is bliss, ‘Tis folly to be wise.

The full line is conditional: where ignorance is bliss, it is folly to be wise. Cut to three words, it becomes a general rule that the poem does not state.

5. “Discretion is the better part of valour”

Holds up In Shakespeare the line goes on: “in the which better part I have saved my life”. The speaker is Falstaff, in Henry IV, Part 1 (Act 5, Scene 4). His word order is “The better part of valour is discretion”.

In the scene, Douglas attacks Falstaff, who falls down as if he were dead. He stays down while Prince Hal kills Hotspur. Taking Falstaff for dead, the Prince says he will see him embowelled before long. Once the Prince has gone, Falstaff rises up.

He explains himself: “to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed”. The line comes from a comic character explaining why he played dead. Whether it is good advice anyway is the reader’s call.

6. “Religion is the opium of the people”

Holds up Karl Marx’s opium line comes straight after he calls religion “the sigh of the oppressed creature”. It is from his introduction to a critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right. It was printed in Paris in 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. In our translation of the German:

Religious misery is at once the expression of real misery and a protest against real misery. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

In the original, that last sentence reads “Sie ist das Opium des Volks”. The next paragraph begins: “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness” (our translation).

How to read the passage is the reader’s call. The point here is only that the short version leaves out the sentences around it.

7. “Only the dead have seen the end of war”

Doesn't hold up Plato’s name has become attached to it, but the line is George Santayana’s, from Soliloquies in England, published in 1922. It comes from a short piece called “Tipperary”. On the day the bells ring for the Armistice, he hears wounded officers in an Oxford coffee-house singing the old marching song.

The passage reads: “Yet the poor fellows think they are safe! They think that the war — perhaps the last of all wars — is over! Only the dead are safe; only the dead have seen the end of war.” It goes on: “Not that non-existence deserves to be called peace”.

Bernard Suzanne, who runs a website on Plato’s dialogues, was asked for its source in Plato. He wrote that he had been unable, to this day, to locate it in any one of the dialogues.

8. “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink”

Partly The first half is Coleridge’s, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but the ending is not. In Lyrical Ballads (1798) the lines read:

Water, water, every where, Ne any drop to drink.

In the version printed in Coleridge’s Sibylline Leaves (1817), the second line is “Nor any drop to drink”. The ship is becalmed, as still as a painted ship on a painted ocean, and the sailors have nothing to drink. “And not a drop to drink” is not in either text.

9. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”

Partly The words are close to William Congreve’s, from his tragedy The Mourning Bride (1697). But the line is the second half of a couplet. At the end of Act III, Zara says:

Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d, Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.

The popular version drops the first line, about love turned to hatred, and rewrites the second.

10. “Gild the lily”

Doesn't hold up Shakespeare came close, but he wrote two images, not one. In King John (Act 4, Scene 2), the king has just been crowned a second time. Salisbury says that doing so is like trying “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily”. He calls such things “wasteful and ridiculous excess”.

The common phrase merges the two images into one. Phrase Finder’s earliest example of “gild the lily” is from an American newspaper of 1895.

11. “Survival of the fittest”

Doesn't hold up Darwin did use the phrase, but it is Herbert Spencer’s. In The Principles of Biology, volume I (1864), Spencer wrote of “This survival of the fittest”. It is, he said, what Mr Darwin had called natural selection.

Darwin took the phrase into the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species (1869), with credit. Spencer’s expression, he wrote, is more accurate than his own term, natural selection, and is sometimes equally convenient. His chapter on natural selection is headed “Natural Selection; or the Survival of the Fittest”.

In the same edition, individuals with any advantage, however slight, over others have the best chance of surviving. Selection keeps only the variations that are beneficial to a creature under its conditions of life. Fittest, in other words, means best suited to the conditions, which is not the same as strongest.

“Full versions” that were added later

12. “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back”

Doesn't hold up The second half came much later. The older form of the proverb blamed care, meaning worry, not curiosity.

The line is in Ben Jonson’s comedy Every Man in His Humour, first acted in 1598. In the first printed text of 1601, a character says: “hang sorrow, care will kill a cat, vptailes all, and a poxe on the hangman”.

Jonson’s revised text of 1616 has “care’ll kill a cat”. Shakespeare has “What though care killed a cat” in Much Ado About Nothing.

The curiosity form is in print by 1873, listed as an Irish proverb in James Allan Mair’s A Handbook of Proverbs. Phrase Finder reports the “satisfaction brought it back” reply in a Pennsylvania newspaper in December 1912. In the Internet Archive’s scanned books, the earliest book we found with the reply is from 1947.

13. “Great minds think alike, but fools seldom differ”

Doesn't hold up The idea behind the first half is old, and the second half is much younger. Phrase Finder traces the idea to 1618, as “Good wits doe jumpe”, where jump meant to agree. Laurence Sterne opens a chapter in the third volume of Tristram Shandy with “Great wits jump”.

Phrase Finder’s earliest “great minds think alike” is from 1816. Its earliest “fools seldom differ” is a list of proverbs printed in 1932.

The earliest we found in the Internet Archive’s scanned books is a little older. In the psychical researcher Harry Price’s 1931 report on a medium’s séances, the notes of one sitting record the line “Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ”. That is still more than a century after the first half.

14. “The customer is always right in matters of taste”

Doesn't hold up No early source has been found for the longer version. The longer version is often credited to Harry Gordon Selfridge. Snopes, which looked for it, found no evidence that he ever said it. That includes his 1918 book The Romance of Commerce.

We searched the full text of that book too and did not find “always right” or “matters of taste” in it.

The earliest use Snopes could verify is from The Boston Globe in September 1905. It says that the department-store owner Marshall Field “adheres to the theory that ‘the customer is always right’”.

There is a longer version, but it is a different one. Snopes quotes a 1919 business magazine on Field’s rule: “assume that the customer is right until it is plain beyond all question that he is not”.

15. “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese”

Doesn't hold up The first half is old, but the second is a modern joke. John Ray’s A Collection of English Proverbs (1670) has “The early bird catcheth the worm”.

Quote Investigator’s earliest example of this kind of joke is a December 1994 post on Usenet, an internet discussion system. The joined-up version appeared in another Usenet post in February 1995. Its authorship is unknown. In the Internet Archive’s scanned books, the earliest book we found with “second mouse gets the cheese” is from 1997.

How to check a quote’s ending yourself

The method is the same as for any quote, with one extra step: reading past the full stop.

1. The oldest text available. A collected works, a scan of a first edition or an old proverb collection says more than a quotation site. Our guide to spotting fake quotes shows where to look.

2. The sentences on either side. Several of the lines above change meaning once you see who says them and why: Falstaff playing dead, Gray watching schoolboys, Bacon arguing about God.

3. A date for any tidy second line. A rider that answers the first half neatly, like “satisfaction brought it back”, is easy to add and hard to check. Searching for the long version on its own shows when it first turns up in the sources searched.

4. The speaker in the original. A line in a play belongs to a character. A line in a poem may answer a question the poem has just asked.

Why it matters

A saying that loses its second half can end up saying something its author did not. Gray’s conditional becomes a general rule, and Falstaff’s excuse for playing dead travels as advice. So when a short line seems to settle an argument, it can help to look for the sentence that comes after it.

Sources

Texts

• Francis Bacon, Meditationes Sacrae (1597), Latin text and English translation in James Spedding (ed.), The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. VII (London, 1859), pp. 241 and 253 (archive.org scan).
• Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, I.3, ed. Joseph Devey (Project Gutenberg #45988); Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Francis Bacon”.
• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ch. X (Project Gutenberg #3207); Latin Leviathan (1668), Part I, cap. X, in Opera Philosophica, ed. W. Molesworth, vol. 3 (London: Bohn; dated 1839 in the Internet Archive record) (archive.org scan); Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Thomas Hobbes”.
• Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, first edition (1711) (archive.org scan); later edition with notes (Project Gutenberg #7409).
• William Camden, Remaines, concerning Britaine (1623 edition), “Certaine Prouerbes” (archive.org scan).
• Thomas Gray, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, text and editors’ notes, Thomas Gray Archive.
• William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, King John and Much Ado About Nothing, in The Complete Works (Project Gutenberg #100).
• Karl Marx, “Zur Kritik der Hegel’schen Rechts-Philosophie. Einleitung”, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (Paris, 1844), pp. 71–72 (Wikisource transcription of the scans).
• George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922), “Tipperary”, p. 102 (archive.org scan).
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere”, in Lyrical Ballads (1798) (Project Gutenberg #9622); “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, in Sibylline Leaves (1817) (archive.org scan).
• William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (1697), end of Act III (archive.org scan; second copy).
• Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology, vol. I (1864), §165, p. 444 (archive.org scan).
• Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 5th edition (1869), pp. 72, 91–92 (Darwin Online).
• Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour, first quarto (London, 1601) (archive.org scan); revised folio text of 1616 (Project Gutenberg #5333).
• Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol. III, ch. IX (Wikisource).
• James Allan Mair, A Handbook of Proverbs (London, 1873) (archive.org scan).
• Harry Price, Regurgitation and the Duncan Mediumship (London, 1931) (archive.org scan).
• Harry Gordon Selfridge, The Romance of Commerce (London, 1918) (archive.org scan).
• John Ray, A Collection of English Proverbs (1670), p. 84 (archive.org scan).

Phrase histories

• Phrase Finder: “Curiosity killed the cat”, “Great minds think alike”, “The proof of the pudding”, “Gild the lily”, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”.
• Snopes, “The Enigmatic Origins of ‘The Customer is Always Right’”.
• Quote Investigator, “The Second Mouse Gets the Cheese”; Barry Popik, “The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese”.
• Bernard Suzanne, “Did Plato write ‘Only the dead have seen the end of war’?”, Plato and his dialogues.
• Internet Archive full-text search of scanned books (Open Library search inside), run 5 October 2026 for “satisfaction brought it back”, “fools seldom differ” and “second mouse gets the cheese”.

We read every text above in a public-domain edition, a scan of an early printing or a scholarly transcription; translations from the German are ours. Dates that come from newspaper searches we could not repeat (the 1905, 1912, 1919 and 1932 finds) are given as reported by Phrase Finder or Snopes. A search of scanned books covers only what has been scanned, so “the earliest we found” means exactly that.

Checked October 2026.