19th-century English Jesuit priest · earliest recorded 1863
Per Quote Investigator, the earliest documented form of this saying appears in Sir M. E. Grant Duff’s Notes from a Diary, in an entry dated 21 September 1863 that credits a Jesuit “Father Strickland” with the remark. The thought was already a proverbial commonplace by the late 1800s and was later echoed by Benjamin Jowett, Edward Everett Hale, C. E. Montague and others — long before Ronald Reagan adopted a version of it for his desk plaque.