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Who really said it

Discretion is the better part of valour

Shakespeare — but not in these words William Shakespeare Baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616 · English playwright & poet
Right author, wrong word order — and the idea, in quite different words, was in English print before him. Free to reuse

Falstaff says it in Henry IV, Part 1, Act 5, scene 4, and it is there in the play’s first printing of 1598 ↗ — but as “The better part of valour is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life.” The familiar reversed proverb appears nowhere in Shakespeare, and the Oxford proverb tradition traces the sentiment back to Caxton, more than a century before the play.

Last verified 29 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“The better part of valour is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life.” Falstaff, in William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, Act 5, scene 4 (first printed 1598). The popular form, "Discretion is the better part of valour," reverses Shakespeare's wording. Verified at quotle.info

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Provenance

Henry IV, Part 1, Act 5, scene 4

Work
Henry IV, Part 1
Passage
Act 5, scene 4 — Falstaff gets up off the battlefield at Shrewsbury
First printed
1598 first quarto, London: printed by P[eter] S[hort] for Andrew Wise
Shakespeare’s wording
“The better part of valour is discretion” — the reverse of the modern proverb

Counterfeit? I lie, I am no counterfeit. To die, is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man: but to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed. The better part of valour is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life. Act 5, scene 4

Modern-spelling text exactly as printed in Project Gutenberg’s Complete Works ↗, which keeps the British spelling; the Folger Shakespeare edition ↗ sets the same clause as “The better part of valor is discretion” and punctuates it “I lie. I am no counterfeit.” The word order is not an editorial modernisation: the 1598 first quarto ↗ already sets the clause as “The better part of valour is discretion,” and so does every text after it.

1598 first quarto — facsimile scan
Read the 1598 quarto at the Internet Archive
Folger Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part 1, Act 5, scene 4

How the line travelled

  • c. 1477 — the idea, in different words. The Oxford proverb tradition traces the saying back past Shakespeare to Caxton’s Jason — the entry’s own locator is the Early English Text Society edition, page 23 — where the wording is nothing a modern reader would recognise: “more is worth a good retrayte than a folisshe abydinge.” The same entry also cites Euripides’ Suppliants, line 510 ↗.
  • 1598 — the line, in print. Henry IV, Part 1 was entered in the Stationers’ Company register on 25 February 1598 and first printed in quarto later that year by Andrew Wise ↗. Falstaff’s speech is already there, in Shakespeare’s order.
  • 1762 — the flip, in verse. Charles Churchill writes, in The Ghost, Book I: “That, even in a hero’s heart, / Discretion is the better part” — the modern word order, if not yet the modern phrase. Read it in Churchill’s collected poems ↗.
  • Today — the reversal, everywhere. A search of the whole canon in Project Gutenberg’s Complete Works ↗ returns “better part of valour” exactly once, in this scene, and the string “discretion is the better part” not at all.
Public domain

The line was first printed in the 1598 first quarto of Henry IV, Part 1 and reprinted in the 1623 First Folio, so the text has been out of copyright for centuries in the United States and everywhere else. Only a modern editor’s notes and apparatus could carry rights — the words of the play quoted here cannot.

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

Three things the quotation usually gets wrong

The credit to Shakespeare is basically sound. Almost everything else about the way this line gets repeated is not — the words, the speaker, and the claim that he thought of it.

Shakespeare, as though he wrote “Discretion is the better part of valour” Reversed

The proverb flips his sentence end to end. Falstaff’s actual words are “The better part of valour is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life” — the reading in Folger’s edition ↗ and in the 1598 quarto alike. Search the canon and the reversed string never appears.

Shakespeare himself, quoted as his own counsel It’s Falstaff

The line belongs to a comic braggart who has just dropped to the ground on the field at Shrewsbury and played dead the moment the Earl of Douglas came at him, then risen to swear he killed Hotspur himself. In the scene ↗ it is a self-serving alibi, not authorial advice.

Shakespeare, as the proverb’s inventor Older

The Oxford proverb tradition traces the sentiment to Caxton’s Jason (c. 1477, EETS edition p. 23) — “more is worth a good retrayte than a folisshe abydinge” — and the same entry also points to a comparable line in Euripides’ Suppliants ↗. Shakespeare gave the idea its most quotable sentence; he did not originate it.

Shakespeare wrote the line, and the 1598 first quarto ↗ proves it — but he wrote “The better part of valour is discretion,” and he put it in the mouth of a man who had just faked his own death.

Context

Why it mattered

The end of the battle at Shrewsbury. Falstaff — fat, broke, and nominally fighting for the king — has traded a few blows with the Earl of Douglas and then dropped to the ground and played dead. Prince Hal, finding him there, delivers a small eulogy over him. Then, as the stage direction has it, Falstaff rises up.

The first thing he does on his feet is build a philosophy that makes lying down look brave: to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby lives, is not counterfeiting at all but “the true and perfect image of life indeed.” Shakespeare hands the definition of valour to the one man in the play with no claim on it, which is the joke. Four centuries on we quote it straight, with the word order flipped, as sound advice.

Falstaff isn’t defining valour. He’s filing an excuse.

Read the full story

The saying was already old when Shakespeare reached for it. The Oxford proverb tradition tracks the sentiment to Caxton’s Jason around 1477 (EETS edition p. 23), in wording no modern reader would recognise as the same proverb; the same entry also points to a comparable line in Euripides’ Suppliants about foresight comprising bravery, offered as a parallel rather than as part of the English lineage.

The reversal was under way well before the Victorian quotation books. In 1762 Charles Churchill put it in couplet form in The Ghost, Book I — “That, even in a hero’s heart, / Discretion is the better part” — already in the modern order, if not yet the modern phrase. Churchill published Books I–III of the poem in 1762 and Book IV in 1763.

Quote Investigator has not published an investigation of this line, and Wikiquote lists it only in its ordinary sourced section for the play, with no Misattributed or Disputed entry. Nothing in the record disputes that Shakespeare wrote the sentence — the dispute is entirely over the sentence people repeat.

Explore

Filed under

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

Wisdom Courage Humility

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.

Henry IV, Part 1, Act 5, scene 4folger.edu

Folger Shakespeare’s free modern-spelling text of the scene, with Falstaff’s speech in full.
The History of Henrie the Fourth (1598 first quarto)archive.org

Scan of a facsimile of the play’s first printing, where the line already reads “The better part of valour is discretion.”
The Complete Works of William Shakespearegutenberg.org

Searchable plain text of the whole canon — how you confirm the reversed proverb appears nowhere in Shakespeare.
Henry IV, Part 1 — sourced quotationsen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s sourced list gives Falstaff’s line at Act V, scene iv in Shakespeare’s original order.
‘discretion is the better part of valor’brians.wsu.edu

Paul Brians’ Common Errors in English Usage notes the modern saying only loosely alludes to Shakespeare’s sentence.
Poetical Works of Charles Churchill (includes The Ghost)gutenberg.org

Full text of The Ghost, Book I, with the 1762 couplet that already carries the reversed wording.

The real author — of a slightly different sentence

Who actually wrote the line

William Shakespeare

Baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616 · English playwright & poet

Shakespeare’s date of birth is unknown; he was baptised on 26 April 1564, traditionally celebrated on the 23rd, and he died on 23 April 1616. He left some 39 plays, 154 sonnets and three long narrative poems, plus a few verses of uncertain authorship. Henry IV, Part 1 was his most reprinted play of the period — new editions in 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613, 1622, 1632, 1639 and 1692 — which is part of why one fat knight’s excuse turned into an English proverb.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

William Shakespeare, The History of Henrie the Fourth, 1st quarto (London: printed by P[eter] S[hort] for Andrew Wise, 1598), Falstaff’s speech at sig. K3r–K3v, the sentence itself on K3v — the quarto carries no act or scene divisions. Modern-spelling text quoted on this page: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Project Gutenberg ebook 100), Henry IV, Part 1, Act 5, scene 4; compare Henry IV, Part 1, 5.4, Folger Shakespeare Library.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Discretion is the better part of valour’?” Last verified 29 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/discretion-is-the-better-part-of-valour/

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