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Who really said it

All things are difficult before they are easy

Attributed to Thomas Fuller 1654–1734 · English physician & adage collector
Attributed Free to reuse

The exact wording appears as No. 560 (numbered 660 in this particular scan) in Thomas Fuller’s 1732 Gnomologia ↗, so the phrase is genuine and correctly linked to his book. But Fuller compiled proverbs rather than coining them ↗ — he recorded an already-circulating saying whose original author is anonymous.

Last verified 16 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“All things are difficult before they are easy” All things are difficult, before they are easy. —Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia (1732), No. 560 (a proverb Fuller collected, not coined)

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Evoking the world of Thomas Fuller — English physician & adage collector. Theme: "All things are difficult before they are easy". 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.

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Provenance

The documented source

Work
Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs; Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings
Compiled by
Thomas Fuller, M.D.
First published
1732 (London)
Entry
No. 560 (No. 660 in the scanned first edition)

560. All things are difficult, before they are easy.

Fuller lists it in a run of adjacent maxims: ‘All things are difficult, before they are easy’ is immediately followed by ‘All things are easy, that are done willingly.’

Gnomologia (1732), full text at the Internet Archive

How we verified this

Public domain

The wording is documented in Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia, first published in 1732 — nearly three centuries ago and long in the public domain in the United States. (As a proverb Fuller collected rather than authored, no individual holds rights to the phrase itself.)

Fact-check

Who it’s wrongly pinned on

Two attribution problems attach to this proverb: crediting Fuller as its author, and a separate false trail to the Persian poet Saadi.

Thomas Fuller as originator collector, not author

Fuller’s Gnomologia is where the earliest match appears, so quoting ‘Thomas Fuller’ as the source of the book is fair. But Fuller was, per Quote Investigator ↗, ‘primarily a collector and not a crafter of sayings’ — he recorded a proverb already in circulation, so treating him as the mind who coined it overstates the record.

Saadi (Saʿdi) of Shiraz, 13th-c. Persian poet false trail

Some sources credit the 13th-century Persian poet Saadi. Quote Investigator ↗ shows this began with Moncure Conway’s 1874 Sacred Anthology, which printed ‘Have patience! All things are difficult before they become easy’ just before a Saadi passage — the adage ‘does not appear in the text by Saadi’ but later readers (including Forbes) misread the layout and attached it to him.

The honest verdict: a genuine old proverb, first documented in Thomas Fuller’s 1732 Gnomologia ↗ — Fuller preserved it, but its original author is anonymous, and it is not Saadi’s.

Context

Why it reads as wisdom

The line survives because it compresses a universal experience of learning into six beats: the gap between a skill’s first, clumsy attempt and its eventual ease. That is exactly the kind of tidy, memorable maxim Fuller’s Gnomologia was built to preserve — a numbered warehouse of ‘wise sentences and witty sayings’ drawn from ancient, foreign and British sources.

Fuller kept the proverb; he did not coin it.

About Fuller’s Gnomologia

Gnomologia (1732) collects several thousand short adages, each numbered. Because Fuller drew on older proverb stock, many entries have deep pre-1732 roots in English and continental proverb collections, and individual authorship is usually untraceable — which is precisely why Quote Investigator lands on ‘anonymous’ for this line rather than on Fuller himself.

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

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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.

Adage Origin: All Things Are Difficult, Before They Are Easyquoteinvestigator.com

The authoritative investigation: earliest match in Fuller’s 1732 Gnomologia, origin anonymous, and the Saadi misattribution debunked.
Thomas Fuller (writer) — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Sourced quotations page listing the line as Gnomologia (1732) No. 560, with Fuller’s dates and role as adage collector.
Gnomologia (1732) — full textarchive.org

Digitised primary source in which the exact wording appears among Fuller’s numbered proverbs.
Gnomologia — scanned first editionarchive.org

Page images of Fuller’s 1732 collection for readers who want the original typography.
Thomas Fuller — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the 1654–1734 physician and proverb collector, distinct from the earlier historian of the same name.

The author

About Thomas Fuller

Thomas Fuller

1654–1734 · English physician & adage collector

Thomas Fuller (1654–1734) was an English physician trained at Queens’ College, Cambridge, who is best remembered not for medicine but for two anthologies of proverbs and maxims: Introductio ad Prudentiam (1726–27) and the massive Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs (1732). He was a collector of sayings, gathering ancient, foreign and British adages into numbered lists — which is why phrases ‘from Fuller’ are often folk proverbs he preserved rather than lines he invented. He is frequently confused with the earlier churchman-historian Thomas Fuller (1608–1661).

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Fuller, Thomas. Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs; Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings, Ancient and Modern, Foreign and British. London: B. Barker, 1732, No. 560.

MLA (9th ed.)

Fuller, Thomas. Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs; Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings, Ancient and Modern, Foreign and British. B. Barker, 1732.

APA (7th ed.)

Fuller, T. (1732). Gnomologia: Adagies and proverbs; wise sentences and witty sayings, ancient and modern, foreign and British. B. Barker.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘All things are difficult before they are easy’?” Last verified 16 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/all-things-are-difficult-before-they-are-easy

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