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Who really said it

Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. Before you retire, save. Before you die, give

Not Shakespeare — actually William Arthur Ward William Arthur Ward 1921–1994 · American motivational writer & epigrammatist
Disputed In copyright

Shakespeare never wrote this. The lines are William Arthur Ward’s, published in his 1968 book Thoughts of a Christian Optimist, and Quote Investigator ↗ finds the passage was “implausibly reassigned” to Shakespeare by 2010. The version that travels under Shakespeare’s name is not an excerpt of Ward but a rewrite of him: it keeps five of his nine lines, drops three, adds two he never wrote, and turns his closing “Before you die, give” into “Before you die, live.”

Last verified 14 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. Before you retire, save. Before you die, give” —William Arthur Ward, Thoughts of a Christian Optimist (1968). Frequently misattributed to William Shakespeare, who did not write it.

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

Can you use it?

Still under copyright. A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of William Arthur Ward — American motivational writer & epigrammatist. Theme: "Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. Before you retire, save. Before you die, give". 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 "Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. Before you retire, save. Before you die, give". 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 it actually comes from

Work
Thoughts of a Christian Optimist: The Words of William Arthur Ward
Author
William Arthur Ward (1921–1994)
Published
Droke House, Anderson, S.C., 1968 — 89 pp., LCCN 68013823
Reassigned to Shakespeare
By 2010, per Quote Investigator

Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. Before you retire, save. Before you die, give. Bold — the three lines the Shakespeare version drops

Ward’s list runs nine lines. The version that circulates under Shakespeare’s name is not a shortened Ward but a rewritten one. The Shakespeare-attributed text Quote Investigator reproduces ↗, posted to a Google Group in September 2010, reads: “Before you speak »Listen / Before you write »Think / Before you spend »Earn / Before you pray »Forgive / Before you hurt »Feel / Before you hate »Love / Before you quit »Try / Before you die »Live.” Five of Ward’s lines survive intact; three — invest, criticize, retire — are gone; two are lines Ward never wrote; and his closing give has become live. QI’s own summary of the mutation: the passage “was later modified, supplemented, and reassigned to William Shakespeare.”

Quote Investigator: the full 1907–2010 citation trail

How Ward’s list became Shakespeare’s

  • 1907 — one line is already loose in the world. Quote Investigator ↗ traces “Before you invest, investigate” to Rex Beach’s article “The Madmen of the Desert” in The Saturday Evening Post, 13 July 1907, in a passage about Nevada mining investment.
  • 1968 — the passage reaches print, credited. William Arthur Ward publishes all nine lines in Thoughts of a Christian Optimist, catalogued as Droke House, Anderson S.C., 1968, 89 pp., LCCN 68013823 ↗. QI credits Ward with the aggregation while noting some lines already circulated. Quote: The Weekly Digest reprints it that November with acknowledgement.
  • 1974 — the byline falls off. The compilation 1800 Quips for Speakers and Writers reprints the passage under the label “Excellent advice:” but without attribution ↗. Copies circulating without Ward’s name are free to drift, and QI records that the passage was later modified and supplemented.
  • 1977 — the name is still there. Lloyd Cory’s compilation Quote Unquote prints the passage on page 254 credited to “William A. Ward” ↗. The 1974 anonymous printing did not erase the byline permanently — attribution ran intermittently, which is how a line can be both properly credited and quietly orphaned at the same time.
  • By 2010 — Shakespeare collects. QI’s verdict is that the passage was “implausibly reassigned to William Shakespeare” ↗. Corrections followed quickly: “No, that’s William Arthur Ward” ↗, one debunking blog answered, printing the full nine lines.
In copyright

These lines are not public domain. They were first published in Ward’s Thoughts of a Christian Optimist in 1968 — well after the 1931 threshold — and US works published between 1964 and 1977 with a copyright notice received automatic renewal, giving them a 95-year term that runs into the 2060s. Who holds those rights today is not publicly recorded: the book was published by Droke House (Anderson, S.C.), and no renewal or assignment record we can cite says whether the copyright stayed with the publisher or with Ward — so for permission, start with the publisher or Ward’s estate. The Shakespeare misattribution is doubly costly here: it strips a modern author’s estate of credit and falsely implies the text is ancient and free to use. (The one exception is “Before you invest, investigate,” which per Quote Investigator was already in print in 1907 and is old enough to be public domain on its own.)

Fact-check

Who gets the credit, and who earned it

This is a twentieth-century American epigram wearing an Elizabethan coat. The misattribution is recent, traceable, and — on the evidence — entirely groundless.

William Shakespeare The viral claim

There is no evidence he wrote any of it. Quote Investigator ↗ dates the reassignment to no later than 2010 and calls it implausible. The passage is absent from Wikiquote’s list of quotes misattributed to Shakespeare, and the Folger Shakespeare Library’s roundup of fake Bard quotes doesn’t cover this one either — but the Folger does warn that “fake Shakespeare quotes are being shared on social media” ↗ every day.

William Arthur Ward Only partly his

Ward gathered this line rather than coining it. QI traces it to Rex Beach ↗, in his article “The Madmen of the Desert” in The Saturday Evening Post of 13 July 1907, written about Nevada mining investment — sixty-one years before Ward’s book. QI credits Ward with the aggregation, noting some lines were already in circulation.

No documented author Later accretion

The passage didn’t just change hands, it changed shape. QI records that it was modified and supplemented ↗ before and during its Shakespeare phase, so circulating copies may carry lines Ward never wrote alongside ones he did.

Anonymous The step that enabled it

By 1974 the compilation 1800 Quips for Speakers and Writers reprinted the passage without attribution ↗, even though Quote: The Weekly Digest had credited Ward properly in November 1968. An orphaned quote is a quote waiting for a famous name.

Quote Investigator ↗ credits the passage to William Arthur Ward and his 1968 book Thoughts of a Christian Optimist, finding that it was “implausibly reassigned to William Shakespeare by 2010.”

Context

Why this one travels so well

The passage is engineered to spread. Nine imperatives, each an identical two-beat snap — before you X, Y — with no clause longer than four words. It is the prose equivalent of a drumbeat, and it was built that way on purpose: William Arthur Ward wrote epigrams the way other people write jingles, for greeting cards and newspaper columns where a line has about one second to land.

But the very quality that makes it memorable is what strips it of its author. A line this compact needs no context, so it gets copied without any — and an orphaned aphorism drifts until it finds a famous name to attach to. Shakespeare is the strongest gravitational field in the English language. The odd part isn’t that the passage ended up under his name; it’s that anyone believed it, given how modern Ward’s counsel sounds. Not the words themselves — retire, save and invest were all available to Shakespeare, and he used them. It’s the senses: retire meaning to leave the workforce on a pension, and invest/investigate as personal financial advice, belong to a twentieth-century idiom. The vocabulary is Elizabethan; the meanings are not.

Ward is quoted constantly and credited rarely. That gap is exactly where misattribution grows.

The mechanism: how a credited quote becomes an anonymous one

Quote Investigator's citation trail shows the attribution being sanded off in stages rather than in one dramatic act. The passage appeared in Ward's 1968 book, and was printed in Quote: The Weekly Digest in November 1968 with acknowledgement. By 1974 it was reprinted in the compilation 1800 Quips for Speakers and Writers without attribution — though three years later Lloyd Cory's Quote Unquote (1977) still credited “William A. Ward” on page 254.

So the byline didn't snap off once and for all; it flickered. That is the more ordinary way attribution dies — not one dramatic theft but a compilation here printing the name and a compilation there dropping it, until enough nameless copies are in circulation that the nameless version becomes the default. A quotation anthology that drops the byline converts a sourced line into a free-floating one, and every copier downstream of it inherits the anonymity rather than the citation. Decades of that, and the internet supplied a name — the biggest one available.

There is a further wrinkle that argues against Shakespeare on internal evidence alone. Ward's list did not spring fully formed from his own head either: QI traces “Before you invest, investigate” to Rex Beach in 1907, writing about Nevada mining swindles. Ward's achievement was the aggregation — gathering and shaping existing counsel into a single cadenced sequence. That is a real authorial act, and it happened in 1968, not 1600.

Explore

Filed under

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

Wisdom Character

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 Origin: Before You Speak, Listen. Before You Write, Thinkquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive investigation, and this page's anchor. Traces the citation trail from Rex Beach (1907) through Ward's 1968 book to the Shakespeare reassignment by 2010.
William Arthur Warden.wikipedia.org

Biography of the actual author: American motivational writer, 1921–1994, author of 4,000+ epigrams published in Reader's Digest and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Thoughts of a Christian optimist — catalog recordopenlibrary.org

Library record for the source book: Droke House, Anderson, S.C., 1968, 89 pages, LCCN 68013823, distributed by Grosset and Dunlap.
Thoughts of a Christian Optimist — bibliographic entrybooks.google.com

Second independent confirmation of the 1968 Droke House edition, 89 pages, digitized from the Indiana University copy.
5 quotes commonly misattributed to Shakespearefolger.edu

The Folger Shakespeare Library on the wider phenomenon. It does not cover this passage, but it documents five parallel cases and warns that fake Shakespeare quotes spread daily on social media.
That's. Not. Shakespeare. — "No, that's William Arthur Ward"thatsnotshakespeare.tumblr.com

An early crowd-sourced correction naming Ward and printing the full nine-line passage — evidence the misattribution was being pushed back on well before QI's write-up.

The man who actually wrote it

William Arthur Ward, the most-quoted writer nobody can name

William Arthur Ward

1921–1994 · American motivational writer & epigrammatist

William Arthur Ward (1921–1994) was an American motivational writer who produced more than 4,000 epigrams — short, balanced, aphoristic lines built for greeting cards, church bulletins, and desk plaques. His sayings ran in Reader’s Digest and in his “Pertinent Proverbs” column for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and were collected into some thirteen books. Ward spent his working life in Texas as a public-relations man and educator, serving for decades as assistant to the president of Texas Wesleyan College. His fate is a peculiar one: he is quoted constantly and credited rarely — which is precisely how a famous name ends up on his work.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

How to cite this

William Arthur Ward, Thoughts of a Christian Optimist: The Words of William Arthur Ward (Anderson, SC: Droke House, 1968), 89 pp., LCCN 68013823. Citation trail documented in “Quote Origin: Before You Speak, Listen. Before You Write, Think,” Quote Investigator, 26 May 2026.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try’?” Last verified 14 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/before-you-speak-listen-before-you-write-think-before-you

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