No Yeats poem, play, essay or letter contains this sentence, and it appears nowhere on Wikiquote’s Yeats page ↗, which records no disputed or misattributed quotations for him at all. The exact wording first turns up in 1853, on page 227 of an American anthology called The World’s Laconics, filed under the heading ‘Promptness and energy’ and — unlike the signed entry above it — carrying no author’s name at all. That is twelve years before Yeats was born. Quote Investigator ↗ traces the extended metaphor further back still, to a letter Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1782, and finds the Yeats credit appearing for the first time in 1997, in a quote-of-the-day post on Usenet.
“Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking” Not W. B. Yeats. An unsigned maxim — earliest printing 1853, in The World's Laconics, p. 227. The earliest known form of the metaphor is Benjamin Franklin's, in a letter to Richard Price of 13 June 1782.
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to W. B. Yeats. Use the credit shown above instead.
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In context
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Provenance
Where the wording actually comes from
Earliest printing of this wording
1853, The World’s Laconics, p. 227 — unsigned
Compiled by
Tryon Edwards, writing as ‘Everard Berkeley’ · introduction by William B. Sprague · M. W. Dodd, New York
Earliest known form of the idea
Benjamin Franklin to Richard Price, Passy, 13 June 1782
Yeats source
None — first credited to him in 1997, in a Usenet post
Promises.—We promise according to our hopes, but perform according to our fears.—Rochefoucauld.
Promptness and energy.—Do not wait to strike, till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
Promptness and energy.—“How,” said one to Sir W. Raleigh, of whom it was said he “could toil terribly,”—“how do you accomplish so much, and in so short a time?” “When I have anything to do, I go and do it,” was the reply.
Unsigned, 1853
Page 227 of The World’s Laconics, as printed. The entry above it carries an author’s name — Rochefoucauld, Goldsmith, Sir W. Temple, Tillotson, Washington all appear on the surrounding pages — and this one carries none, in a book whose own subtitle is The Best Thoughts of the Best Authors. Note also the comma the compiler set after ‘strike’, which the modern circulating version drops.
The proverb it extends is ancient; Chaucer already has men smiting while the iron is hot. The extension — heat the iron yourself — has an earliest known instance that is unexpectedly precise: a letter from Benjamin Franklin to the Reverend Richard Price, dated Passy, 13 June 1782, printed at page 96 of William Morgan’s Memoirs of the Life of The Rev. Richard Price (1815). Franklin is writing about the power of the press, and closes the thought: ‘it is not only right to strike while the iron is hot, but that it may be very practicable to heat it by continually striking’ the 1815 volume ↗.
Cromwell enters by accident. In Lacon (1821) the English cleric Charles Caleb Colton wrote that a policy which can strike only while the iron is hot ‘will be overcome by that perseverance, which, like Cromwell’s, can make the iron hot by striking’ — naming Cromwell as an example of persistence, not as the author of a phrase. Later compilers dropped the distinction and printed the words as Cromwell’s outright. The sentence can be read at page 47 of an early American edition Lacon, New York 1824, from the eighth London edition ↗.
The wording everyone now quotes is set in 1853, in The World’s Laconics: Or, The Best Thoughts of the Best Authors, compiled by Tryon Edwards under the pen name Everard Berkeley, with an introduction by the Presbyterian minister William B. Sprague. On page 227, under ‘Promptness and energy’, it stands alone with no credit at all the scanned volume ↗. Sprague’s name is on the title page as the writer of the introduction — and Sprague is who later gets the credit.
Yeats arrives late and from nowhere. The first attribution to him that Quote Investigator can locate is a Usenet message of 7 June 1997 in alt.quotations, headed ‘Creative Quotations for Jun 13 from William Butler Yeats’. The subject line is a date-of-the-day format, and Yeats was born on 13 June. A newspaper columnist in Appleton, Wisconsin repeated the credit in February 2000, and it circulates under his name on quote sites today the full investigation ↗.
✓Public domain
Both sources that matter here are long out of copyright in the United States. The earliest known printing of this exact wording is an American book of 1853, where it stands unsigned; the earliest known form of the metaphor is a Franklin letter of 1782, published in 1815. Anything first published before 1931 is in the US public domain, so the sentence is free to reproduce, and no author or estate has ever been in a position to claim it. The only real constraint is factual rather than legal: do not print it over the name of W. B. Yeats — or of Cromwell, either Sprague, Lamb or Hemingway. This is not legal advice.
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
The attribution problem
This is a saying with no owner, and it shows. Since the 1850s it has been handed to at least six different people, not one of whom has ever been shown to have written it. Quote Investigator lays out the whole procession, decade by decade.
✕
The usual credit todayNot W. B. Yeats no source of any kind
No poem, play, essay, letter or manuscript has ever been produced, and the line is absent from Wikiquote’s Yeats page ↗, which records no disputed or misattributed quotations for him at all. The wording was already in print in 1853, twelve years before Yeats was born, and the first credit to him is a Usenet quote-of-the-day post from 1997.
✕
Oliver CromwellNamed as an example, not as the author a misread illustration
Charles Caleb Colton’s Lacon (1821) invokes ‘that perseverance, which, like Cromwell’s, can make the iron hot by striking’ — Cromwell is the model of persistence in Colton’s sentence, not its speaker. By 1878 The Bee-Keeper’s Magazine was printing the words as something Cromwell said outright Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗.
~
William B. SpragueWrote the introduction, not the line title-page drift
Sprague’s name is printed on the 1853 title page as the author of the book’s introduction; the saying itself sits unsigned on page 227 the scanned volume ↗. By 1989, William Safire and Leonard Safir’s Words of Wisdom: More Good Advice was printing the line over Sprague’s name.
✕
Peleg Sprague, Charles Lamb, Ernest HemingwayThree more passing credits a moving target
An 1850 filler item in the Fayetteville Observer gave a version to Peleg Sprague — a different Sprague entirely; an 1895 dental trade journal handed it to Charles Lamb; and in January 1964 Playboy ran ‘It is good policy to strike while the iron is hot. It is better still to make the iron hot by striking’ in a set of aphorisms bylined Ernest Hemingway. None of the three carries a source the full chronology ↗.
✓The honest answer is that nobody knows who wrote it. The oldest printing of this exact sentence is an unsigned entry on page 227 of an 1853 American quotation book; the oldest known form of the thought is Franklin’s, in a letter of 13 June 1782. As Quote Investigator concludes, many names have been attached over the years, but the supporting evidence has been ‘scanty’ read the investigation ↗.
Context
Why this one travels so well
The sentence is built to be repeated. It takes a proverb everyone already knows — strike while the iron is hot — and turns it inside out with a semicolon. You do not wait for the moment; you manufacture it. That structure is why it has survived 170 years of being handed from name to name: it is memorable enough to carry itself, and short enough that nobody feels the need to check where it came from.
It is also, quietly, the perfect shape for an orphan. A saying that arrives in print already unsigned has no defender and no estate, so every generation is free to give it to whoever seems most likely. In the nineteenth century that meant a soldier famous for relentlessness, then an essayist; in the twentieth, a novelist, and finally a poet. Yeats got it last, in 1997, from a birthday-keyed quotation feed — and, because the internet copies rather than checks, that is where it has stayed.
A maxim about seizing the initiative, printed in 1853 with nobody’s name on it — in a book subtitled The Best Thoughts of the Best Authors.
What Franklin was actually talking about
Franklin’s 1782 version is not a self-help line at all. Writing to the Reverend Richard Price from Passy, just after the fall of Lord North’s ministry, he is making an argument about the printing press as an instrument of politics: the Greek and Roman orators ‘could only speak to the number of citizens capable of being assembled within the reach of their voice’, whereas ‘now by the press we can speak to nations’.
The iron follows directly from that. Repeating the same truths daily, in different lights, in newspapers that are everywhere read, is what makes it ‘very practicable to heat it by continually striking’. In its original setting the metaphor is about propaganda and public opinion, not personal initiative — the motivational reading is what the next two centuries did to it.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1865–1939 · Irish poet, dramatist and Nobel laureate (1923)
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist, a leading figure of the Irish Literary Revival, a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, and the winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is also a standing magnet for unsourced wisdom: brisk, encouraging one-liners with no owner drift onto his name because he is famous, quotable, Irish and long dead. The tell here is register. Yeats wrote about gyres and swans and Byzantium; a blacksmith’s maxim about seizing the initiative sounds nothing like him, and no edition of his work contains it. The line reached his name in 1997, fifty-eight years after he died, by way of a Usenet quote-of-the-day post.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Unsigned, 1853
Earliest documented printing of this exact wording: [Tryon Edwards], The World’s Laconics: Or, The Best Thoughts of the Best Authors, comp. ‘Everard Berkeley’, intro. William B. Sprague (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1853), 227 — printed without attribution. Earliest known form of the metaphor: Benjamin Franklin to Richard Price, Passy, 13 June 1782, in William Morgan, Memoirs of the Life of The Rev. Richard Price (London: R. Hunter, 1815), 96. Not W. B. Yeats.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/do-not-wait-to-strike-till-the-iron-is-hot-but-make-it-hot/