Fernando Sabino was a Brazilian writer and journalist who published his first book in 1941 and went on to author roughly fifty across his career, winning national and international recognition with O encontro marcado (A Time to Meet, 1956). His claim on this quote is not that he coined it — in the 1988 book O tabuleiro de damas he presents it as something his father, Domingos Sabino, used to say. That secondhand credit is, so far, the oldest documented trace anyone has found of the saying in any language.