If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue
Not Edmund Burke — an English proverb, in print by 1732Unknown — an anonymous English proverbCollected by Thomas Fuller · in print by 1732, Gnomologia no. 2745
The line was in print before Burke could write. It is numbered adage 2745 in Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs; Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings, Ancient and Modern, Foreign and British, compiled by the physician Thomas Fuller and published in London in 1732 — three years after Burke was born in 1729, and a quarter of a century before his first book. Fuller collected proverbs rather than coined them, so even he is not the author; his book is simply the earliest printed appearance anyone has located. Meanwhile the sentence is absent from the twelve-volume Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (Nimmo, 1887), from the four-volume Correspondence (Rivington, 1844) and from Wikiquote’s sourced Burke entries, and no page crediting him has ever named a work, a speech, a letter or a date.
“If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue” is an English proverb, printed as adage no. 2745 in Thomas Fuller's Gnomologia (London, 1732) — three years after Edmund Burke was born. It is widely credited to Burke, but appears nowhere in his twelve-volume Works (Nimmo, 1887) or his four-volume Correspondence (Rivington, 1844). — Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Edmund Burke. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Provenance
The paper trail — and where it actually starts
Claimed author
Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
Claimed source
None — no work, speech, letter or date is ever named
Earliest located source
Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs, adage no. 2745 (London: printed for B. Barker, A. Bettesworth and C. Hitch, 1732)
Corpus searched
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 12 vols. (Nimmo, 1887); Correspondence, 4 vols. (Rivington, 1844)
Result
No match in Burke — and the proverb was already in print in 1732, three years after he was born
If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.
This is not an orphan sentence but a numbered entry in a proverb book. In the 1732 Gnomologia it sits in an alphabetical run: 2744 “If you can abide a cross Wife, you need not fear any Company.” 2745 “If you can be well without Health, you may be happy without Virtue.” 2746 “If you command wisely, you’ll be obey’d cheerfully.” Fuller printed more than six thousand of these; the neighbours make plain that this is common proverbial property, not a sentence lifted out of anybody’s essay.
It is in print in 1732. The sentence is numbered adage 2745 in Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs; Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings, Ancient and Modern, Foreign and British (London: printed for B. Barker, A. Bettesworth and C. Hitch, 1732) — the first-edition scan, from the Oxford copy ↗, where the title page reads M.DCCXXXII. The same wording stands at the same number in the 1817 Allman edition, digitised from the Library of Congress copy ↗. Burke was born in 1729.
It is not in his letters. All four volumes of the Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (F. & J. Rivington, 1844), edited by Earl Fitzwilliam and Sir Richard Bourke, contain neither half of the sentence: vol. 1 ↗, vol. 2 ↗, vol. 3 ↗ — which is filed under a different identifier, so a reader following the correspondenceof0N series hits a dead end at volume 3 — and vol. 4 ↗.
It is not in the record of what he said.Wikiquote’s Burke page ↗ lists his quotations decade by decade with citations and keeps a separate Misattributed section — the line appears in neither.
Where Burke’s name appears, it appears bare.Quotefancy ↗ and A-Z Quotes ↗ credit Burke and name no work, no date and no letter — the citation Fuller supplied in 1732 is exactly what they lost.
✓Public domain
Free to reuse. The wording is fixed in a book published in London in 1732 — Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia, adage no. 2745 — and an anonymous proverb printed nearly three centuries ago is out of copyright everywhere. Reproduce it freely; the only thing to avoid is signing it Edmund Burke, since it is not his and never was.
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, taken apart
Edmund Burke is one of the most heavily counterfeited names in English quotation, and this line is a variation on the usual pattern. Nothing was invented: the sentence is a real, dated, printed proverb. What was invented is the byline.
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The dateEdmund Burke predates him
The proverb is adage no. 2745 in Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia (London, 1732) ↗, printed when Burke was three years old. That alone settles it: a line in print in 1732 cannot have been written by a man born in 1729.
The recordWikiquote’s sourced Burke page not listed
Wikiquote ↗ arranges Burke’s quotations by decade with source citations and maintains a separate Misattributed section. This sentence appears in neither — it has not even reached the stage of being formally debunked.
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The precedentEdmund Burke a repeat target
His single most famous quotation — “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil…” — is likewise a phantom. Quote Investigator ↗ reports that it has not been located in Burke’s writings, and that Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, having once cited an alleged 1795 Burke letter, withdrew the citation after the letter was checked and found not to contain it.
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The routeOnline quote aggregators citation-free
Quotefancy ↗ and A-Z Quotes ↗ both print the line under Burke’s name with no work, no date and no citation of any kind. What they dropped is the citation the line already had: Fuller’s Gnomologia, 1732, adage no. 2745 — a documented root more than a century and a half older than any quotation website.
✓The honest label is an anonymous English proverb, collected by Thomas Fuller in 1732 — not Edmund Burke, who never put health and virtue in the same sentence at all. What he did write, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), is a different thought about virtue: “But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue?” ↗
Context
Why an old proverb ended up with his name on it
The sentence is built the way proverbs are built. It is a reductio: it hands you an absurd premise — that you could be well without being healthy — purely to expose the absurdity of the thing it is actually attacking, the idea that you could be happy without being good. Fuller printed a companion at no. 287 on the identical frame, swapping health for wealth: “A Man may as well expect to be well, and at Ease without Wealth, as Happy without Virtue.” It is a stock eighteenth-century move — which is also, unhelpfully, the shape Burke argued in for four decades, so nobody reading the line under his name thinks to doubt it.
What is missing is Burke. His published output fills twelve volumes and his letters four more, and the line turns up in neither — not in Reflections, not in the speeches, not in a single letter to a single correspondent. Nor does it need him: it was already in print in 1732, when he was three, in a book that names no author for it because proverbs have none. Somewhere between Fuller’s numbered list and the modern quotation sites the number, the book and the date fell away, and a famous name was fitted into the space they left.
In print in 1732, when Burke was three years old — an anonymous proverb that later collections signed with the most quotable name of his century.
How this was checked — and what “earliest located” does and doesn’t mean
Method. The full texts of all twelve volumes of the Nimmo edition of Burke’s Works and of the 1844 Rivington Correspondence were searched for “without health,” “be well without,” “well without health” and “happy without virtue.” Every search returned zero. A deliberately looser check — any single sentence anywhere in those sixteen volumes containing both the word “health” and any form of “virtue” — also returned zero. The positive result came from the other direction: a full-text search of Fuller’s Gnomologia returns the sentence verbatim at no. 2745, in the 1732 first edition and again at the same number in the 1817 Allman edition.
Caveat, stated plainly. 1732 is the earliest appearance located, not necessarily the first that exists. Fuller gathered sayings already in circulation, so the proverb is probably older than his book; it is not in John Ray’s English Proverbs (1678), which is as far back as this check went, and an earlier printing may yet turn up. What that cannot do is make the line Burke’s. He was born in 1729, and no edition of him — not the notebooks, not the reported speeches, not the scholarly letter editions published since 1844 — can pre-date a book printed when he was three.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1729–1797 · Anglo-Irish statesman, orator & political philosopher
Born in Dublin in 1729, Burke sat in the House of Commons from 1765 to 1794 for Wendover, Bristol and Malton, and served twice as Paymaster of the Forces. He wrote A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the book that made him the founding voice of modern conservatism. That reputation is precisely the problem: a name synonymous with moral seriousness attracts moral-sounding maxims he never wrote, and an unsigned proverb from his own century attaches to him more readily than to almost anyone else. Nothing here was forged in his style — the adage was in a proverb book when Burke was three. It simply drifted, as good ownerless lines do, towards the most quotable moralist in reach.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia (1732), no. 2745
Thomas Fuller, comp., Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs; Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings, Ancient and Modern, Foreign and British (London: printed for B. Barker, A. Bettesworth and C. Hitch, 1732), no. 2745; same adage at no. 2745 in the new edition (London: T. and J. Allman, 1817). Fuller compiled proverbs already in circulation rather than composing them, so this is the earliest located printed appearance, not a claim of authorship. The sentence does not appear in Edmund Burke, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 12 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1887), nor in Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, ed. Earl Fitzwilliam and Sir Richard Bourke, 4 vols. (London: F. & J. Rivington, 1844) — and Burke was born in 1729.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue’?” Last verified 3 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-you-can-be-well-without-health-you-may-be-happy-without/