The Bible

The Bible attracts this kind of adoption because so much of English moral vocabulary genuinely came from it, and readers reasonably assume that a saying which sounds scriptural probably is. It is far from alone in being wrongly credited: ‘God helps those who help themselves’, ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’ and ‘money is the root of all evil’ are all outside it, misremembered, or both. Nothing here bears on what scripture says or on anyone’s faith; the question on this page is narrow — where a particular English sentence came from — and the answer is an anonymous Italian proverb that circulated in American newspapers decades before the 1965 film.