Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

A Banker Lends You His Umbrella When It's Sunny and Wants It Back When It Rains

Not Ambrose Bierce — an anonymous banking joke Unknown (an anonymous banking joke) Kernel in print by April 1905 · full wording by January 1930 · originator never identified
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

Quote Investigator ↗ concludes that “the first instances of this maxim are anonymous” and that Mark Twain, Robert Frost and Ambrose Bierce were all “implausibly attached to the quotation” years later. The kernel of the idea turns up in a London accountancy weekly in April 1905, and the full-fledged wording in The Journal of Business of the University of Chicago in January 1930 — credited there to nobody but “some person of shrewd wit.” The line appears nowhere in The Devil’s Dictionary, and the earliest credit to Bierce that QI located is a 1999 economics paper.

Last verified 7 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“A Banker Lends You His Umbrella When It's Sunny and Wants It Back When It Rains” origin unknown; commonly but wrongly credited to Ambrose Bierce, and just as often to Mark Twain or Robert Frost. Quote Investigator finds the earliest instances anonymous: the kernel in The Accountant (London), 15 April 1905, and the full wording in The Journal of Business of the University of Chicago, January 1930, credited only to "some person of shrewd wit." The line appears nowhere in The Devil's Dictionary; the earliest Bierce credit located is a 1999 Bernanke & Gertler paper. Via Quotle.info · Verbatim: “A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Ambrose Bierce. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the themes of power, character and truth. Theme: "A Banker Lends You His Umbrella When It's Sunny and Wants It Back When It Rains". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "A Banker Lends You His Umbrella When It's Sunny and Wants It Back When It Rains". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where the joke actually comes from

Popular attribution
Ambrose Bierce — and, just as often, Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Ralph Waldo Emerson or Philip La Follette
Earliest citation found by QI
The Accountant: The Recognised Weekly Organ of Chartered Accountants
That citation
London, 15 April 1905, page 464 — “Notes on a Banker’s Accounts” by John Moodie, a paper read to the Manchester Chartered Accountants Society on 10 March 1905. The remark is quoted from an unnamed customer, not coined by the author.
Earliest full wording found by QI
The Journal of Business of the University of Chicago, vol. III no. 1, January 1930, page 21, in Lionel D. Edie’s “The Banks and the Stock Market Crisis of 1929” — where it is credited only to “some person of shrewd wit”

Some person of shrewd wit has given a definition of a banker which, though a bit severe, nevertheless strikes a responsive chord. A banker, according to this definition, is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and insists upon its return as soon as it starts to rain. The Journal of Business, January 1930

This is the earliest full-fledged version of the saying that Quote Investigator located, transcribed by QI from the January 1930 issue and marked “Verified on microfilm”. Note what the writer — Lionel D. Edie, analysing the 1929 crash — does with it: he introduces it as something “some person of shrewd wit has given,” the phrasing of a man repeating a line already in circulation. He names nobody. Neither Bierce nor Twain nor Frost is anywhere near it.

Working paper (PDF)
Read the page where Bierce's name was attached (page 8)
Quote Investigator: A Banker Lends You His Umbrella When It's Sunny and Wants It Back When It Rains

The paper trail

  • Quote Investigator ↗ is the anchor. Its verdict: “the first instances of this maxim are anonymous. Years later, famous people such as Mark Twain, Robert Frost, and Ambrose Bierce were implausibly attached to the quotation. The core idea appeared by 1905, and the full fledged quotation entered circulation by 1930.”
  • The 1905 kernel, as QI transcribes it from The Accountant of 15 April 1905, is a bank customer’s grumble reported by an accountant: “A customer who was not getting what he wanted, once said to me: ‘You bankers only lend a man an umbrella when it is a fine day,’ and I thought he expressed it exactly.” Barry Popik’s parallel file ↗ picks the trail up in 1930 and adds two 1932 sightings, listing Emerson, Twain, Frost and Philip La Follette as claimants — and never once mentioning Bierce.
  • The Bierce credit can be dated precisely. On page 8 of NBER Working Paper 7559 ↗, Ben Bernanke and Mark Gertler write that credit flows more freely to borrowers already in strong shape, “hence Ambrose Bierce’s definition of a banker as someone who lends you an umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back when it starts to rain.” The paper was given at Jackson Hole in August 1999 and issued by the NBER in February 2000; it offers no source for the Bierce credit.
  • The negative check is decisive. Searching the complete text of The Devil’s Dictionary ↗ returns no “umbrella” and no “parasol”, and there is no headword for bank, banker or banking. “Banker” occurs once in the entire book, inside the entry for RAREBIT. Wikiquote’s Bierce page ↗, which does keep a Misattributed section, does not list the line at all.

No copyright status can be asserted for the sentence that circulates, because no author and no first publication have ever been identified for it — Quote Investigator’s earliest instances are all anonymous. The two printings closest to the origin (The Accountant, April 1905, and The Journal of Business of the University of Chicago, January 1930) both predate 1931 and would be long out of copyright in the United States, but neither names an author and neither is the sentence quote sites hang on Bierce.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

How an ownerless joke collected four famous fathers

This is a saying with no author and an unusually crowded list of claimants. Quote Investigator ↗ tracks the credits arriving decades after the joke was already common property, each one attaching a famous name to a line that had been circulating unsigned.

Ambrose Bierce Not in his work

The earliest Bierce credit QI ↗ located is from 1999, in a paper by Ben Bernanke and Mark Gertler; the same sentence appears on page 8 of NBER Working Paper 7559 ↗. Bierce was last heard from in a letter dated 26 December 1913. And the line is absent from his work: the full text of The Devil’s Dictionary ↗ has no “umbrella”, no “parasol” and no bank or banker headword. Wikiquote’s Bierce page ↗ does not carry it either, in any section.

Mark Twain Also wrong

The first Twain credit QI ↗ found is Bennett Cerf’s anecdote collection Try and Stop Me, page 241, in 1944 — a full fourteen years after the definition was already in print unsigned. TwainQuotes ↗ lists the line with a standing notice that “until the attribution can be verified, the quote should not be regarded as authentic.”

Robert Frost Also wrong

In 1949 the collector Evan Esar put the saying in The Dictionary of Humorous Quotations twice over — once under Twain and once, in a different wording (“A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back again when it begins to rain”), under Frost. QI ↗ records both entries. A joke credited to two different men in the same book is a joke belonging to neither.

Later quote collections Reworded

The earliest full printing, from January 1930, reads “lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and insists upon its return as soon as it starts to rain.” The smoother sentence that circulates today — “wants it back the minute it begins to rain” — is the form Esar printed under Twain’s name in 1949 ↗, and the one TwainQuotes ↗ carries. The still shorter “wants it back when it rains” is a modern compression, and it is also the form Quote Investigator uses as its own page title.

Nobody knows who made the joke. Quote Investigator ↗’s conclusion is that “the first instances of this maxim are anonymous” and that Twain, Frost and Bierce were “implausibly attached to the quotation” only afterwards — the core idea by 1905, the full quotation in circulation by 1930, and the famous names from 1944 onward.

Context

A joke that grew, then went looking for a father

The saying did not arrive fully formed. Its earliest documented ancestor, in a paper on bankers’ accounts read to the Manchester Chartered Accountants Society in March 1905 and printed in The Accountant that April, is not an aphorism at all — it is a complaint. The author reports that a customer who had been refused what he wanted said to him, “You bankers only lend a man an umbrella when it is a fine day,” and adds, “I thought he expressed it exactly.” The wit belongs to an unnamed bank customer in Edwardian Manchester.

Twenty-five years later the joke had been polished into a definition. In January 1930, weeks after the Wall Street crash, an article in The Journal of Business of the University of Chicago introduced it as something “some person of shrewd wit has given” — a writer passing along a line already in circulation and unable to say whose it was. That is the shape of a proverb, not of an authored epigram. Famous names only started arriving in the 1940s, once the joke was common property and needed a signature.

You bankers only lend a man an umbrella when it is a fine day

Read the full story

The Bierce test is easy to run and it fails cleanly. The complete text of The Devil’s Dictionary on Project Gutenberg ↗ — the 1911 A-to-Z version, running to around a thousand definitions — contains the word “umbrella” zero times and “parasol” zero times, and has no headword for bank, banker or banking. The word “banker” occurs exactly once in the whole book, buried in the entry for RAREBIT, in a gag about riz-de-veau à la financière not being “the smile of a calf prepared after the recipe of a she banker.”

One intriguing near-relative is French. In October 1928, reviewing Philippe Girardet’s Les Affaires et les Hommes for the journal Books Abroad, Harold A. Larrabee of Union College translated Girardet’s definition of a banker as “a man who will gladly lend you a parasol when the sun shines, but who pitilessly refuses you an umbrella when it rains.” The two-object version is sharper than the one that survived, and it is the closest thing to a named author anywhere in the chain — but it predates the English aphorism by only two years and postdates the 1905 kernel by twenty-three, so it reads as another branch of the same joke rather than its root. Quote Investigator ↗ records it without claiming it as the origin, and neither do we.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Power Character Truth

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: A Banker Lends You His Umbrella…quoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation. Traces the saying from an anonymous 1905 remark in The Accountant through the January 1930 full wording, the 1944 first Twain credit and the 1949 Frost credit, to the 1999 Bierce credit — and concludes all the famous names were implausibly attached.
Barry Popik: "A banker lends you an umbrella when the sun is shining…"barrypopik.com

The etymologist's parallel file, cited by QI. Prints the December 1930 International Digest text plus 1932 citations from the Bulletin of the Robert Morris Associates and the Lodi (CA) Sentinel, and lists Emerson, Twain, Frost and Philip La Follette as claimants. Bierce is not mentioned.
TwainQuotes: Bankerwww.twainquotes.com

Barbara Schmidt's Twain quotation directory carries the exact popular wording under a standing warning that the attribution is unverified and the quote should not be regarded as authentic.
The Devil's Dictionary (full text)www.gutenberg.org

The searchable complete text of the work Bierce is famous for. Contains no "umbrella", no "parasol", and no entry for bank, banker or banking — the negative check on the Bierce claim.
Bernanke & Gertler, "Monetary Policy and Asset Price Volatility" (PDF)www.nber.org

NBER Working Paper 7559. On page 8 the authors write "hence Ambrose Bierce's definition of a banker as someone who lends you an umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back when it starts to rain" — the earliest Bierce credit Quote Investigator located.
Wikiquote: Ambrose Bierceen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote's sourced Bierce page, with sections for What I Saw At Shiloh, The Cynic's Word Book (1906), The Devil's Dictionary (1911), Epigrams and Misattributed. The umbrella line does not appear anywhere on it — not even among the misattributions.

About the name it travels under

Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce

1842–c. 1914 · American journalist, Civil War veteran & satirist

Ambrose Bierce (born 24 June 1842) was a Union Army veteran turned San Francisco newspaperman, short-story writer and satirist, best known for An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and for the mordant lexicon first published in October 1906 as The Cynic’s Word Book and reissued in 1911 as The Devil’s Dictionary. He was last heard from in a letter dated 26 December 1913, written from Chihuahua, Mexico, and is generally given as having died around 1914. That reputation — the man who wrote cynical dictionary definitions — is precisely why an ownerless cynical dictionary definition eventually landed on him; but the words “umbrella” and “parasol” do not occur anywhere in The Devil’s Dictionary, which has no entry for bank or banker at all.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

How to cite this

Earliest citation found by Quote Investigator: John Moodie, "Notes on a Banker's Accounts," The Accountant: The Recognised Weekly Organ of Chartered Accountants (London), 15 April 1905, 464 — "You bankers only lend a man an umbrella when it is a fine day." Earliest full-fledged wording found by QI: Lionel D. Edie, "The Banks and the Stock Market Crisis of 1929," The Journal of Business of the University of Chicago 3, no. 1 (January 1930): 21, where the definition is credited only to "some person of shrewd wit." The Ambrose Bierce credit: Ben Bernanke and Mark Gertler, "Monetary Policy and Asset Price Volatility," NBER Working Paper 7559 (February 2000), 8; QI cites the same paper as Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Economic Review 84, no. 4 (Fourth Quarter 1999): 20.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘A Banker Lends You His Umbrella When It's Sunny and Wants It Back When It Rains’?” Last verified 7 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/a-banker-lends-you-his-umbrella-when-its-sunny-and-wants-it/

Something wrong on this page?

Tell us what’s off. A link helps but isn’t required — “this is the wrong person” is a useful report on its own. Nothing here changes the page directly; it goes to our review queue and a human checks it.

Only used to tell you if we act on your report. We never sell or share it.

Copied