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Who really said it

Often we are so busy with sawing that we forget to sharpen the saw

Not Covey’s words — a paraphrase of his real line Stephen Covey 1932–2012 · American educator, businessman & author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
The idea is Covey’s; this sentence is not Rights unconfirmed

The idea belongs to Covey — it is the whole of his seventh habit, which FranklinCovey still publishes as “Sharpen the Saw®” ↗. The sentence does not. Covey’s own aphorism, in print since 1970, runs “We must never become too busy sawing to take time to sharpen the saw.” This reworded version carries no citation anywhere: Wikiquote files it under Disputed ↗, and Open Library’s full-text search of scanned books returns no match at all ↗.

Last verified 25 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“Often we are so busy with sawing that we forget to sharpen the saw” commonly credited to Stephen Covey, but not his wording. Wikiquote lists it under "Disputed" with no citation, and it returns no match in Open Library's full-text book corpus. Covey's documented sentence is: "We must never become too busy sawing to take time to sharpen the saw." — Stephen R. Covey, Spiritual Roots of Human Relations (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1970). Provenance detailed at quotle.info

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We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.

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In context

Evoking the themes of work, growth and wisdom. Theme: "Often we are so busy with sawing that we forget to sharpen the saw". 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

What Covey actually wrote — and what this is

Popular wording
“Often we are so busy with sawing that we forget to sharpen the saw” — no citation has ever been attached to it
Status
Listed under Disputed on Wikiquote; no match in Open Library’s full-text book corpus
What Covey wrote
“We must never become too busy sawing to take time to sharpen the saw.”
Printed in
Spiritual Roots of Human Relations (Deseret Book, 1970)

“…come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree. ‘What are you doing?’ you…” [the exchange runs on, and closes:] “‘I don’t have time to sharpen the saw,’ the man says emphatically. ‘I’m too busy sawing.’” [And Covey’s own aphorism for the habit, carried in his books since 1970:] “We must never become too busy sawing to take time to sharpen the saw.” Fragments as returned by Open Library’s full-text search

Read the two side by side and the difference is the whole case. Covey’s sentence is an instruction with a hinge in it — never become too busy sawing to take time — and the parable it caps is a dialogue, with the punchline in the woodcutter’s mouth rather than the author’s. The circulating version flattens both into a soft observation about what “we” forget, and drops the word Covey leaned on: time. It also arrives with a tell. Wikiquote records it with a doubled full stop — “sharpen the saw..” — the kind of artefact that comes from a list being copied between databases, not from a book being transcribed.

Scanned printing (Deseret Book, 1970)
Borrow Spiritual Roots of Human Relations at the Internet Archive
Wikiquote’s Stephen Covey page, where this wording sits under Disputed

How the wording got here

No rights status can honestly be asserted for this exact sentence, because nobody has identified who wrote it or where it first appeared — it is an anonymous rewording with no located source, and a quotation that cannot be traced cannot be declared public domain. The wording it derives from is a different matter: Covey’s “We must never become too busy sawing to take time to sharpen the saw” is published text from Spiritual Roots of Human Relations (Deseret Book, 1970) and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Simon & Schuster, 1989), both firmly inside US copyright, which is why this page quotes only the short passages under examination.

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

What actually goes wrong with this one

This is not a case of the wrong name on the right words. The name is right — the idea is Covey’s, down to the metaphor — and the words are wrong. That combination is unusually hard to catch, because everything about the sentence checks out except the sentence.

An unsourced rewrite No citation

Nobody has produced a book, page, speech or date for this exact sentence. Wikiquote keeps it in the Disputed block ↗, under a header note explaining that those entries were added to an article for First Things First and moved across, and that “many originally among them have already been found to have been paraphrases, rather than exact quotations.” The sibling entries in that same block — “No gardener, no garden!”, “Until you live, learn how to live.”, “Wisdom is synergy of mind and heart.” — share its slightly off-kilter English.

Open Library’s scanned books Zero matches

Full-text search across Open Library’s scanned corpus finds nothing at all for the phrase “so busy with sawing” ↗ — not in Covey, not in anyone. The same kind of search run on the core of Covey’s real sentence — “too busy sawing to take time to sharpen” — returns about twenty-five books ↗, several of them his own. A line he supposedly wrote should not be absent from every book ever scanned.

Quotation aggregators Copied, not checked

Sites recycle the Wikiquote list and quietly drop the “disputed” qualifier, or attach a book to it that nobody checked. QuotePark reprints the line, states it was “adopted from Wikiquote,” and pins it to First Things First (1994) ↗ — a title inherited from the Wikiquote section’s own editorial history, not from anyone finding the sentence inside the book.

Abraham Lincoln No evidence

The sharpen-your-blade idea is often served up as Lincoln’s — the six-hours-to-chop-a-tree line — and dropped alongside Covey’s habit as though the two were a matched pair. Quote Investigator finds the earliest instance in 1944, credited to an anonymous lumberjack, and states there is “no substantive evidence” Lincoln said anything of the type ↗.

Stephen Covey built an entire habit on this thought, and wrote it down plainly: “We must never become too busy sawing to take time to sharpen the saw” ↗. The version on the poster is somebody else’s rewrite of that line, and no one has ever said whose.

Context

Why this one slips through

Most misattributions fail an obvious test — the person was already dead, or the sentiment is nothing like anything they ever wrote. This one passes every obvious test. Covey really did use this metaphor, really did make it the climax of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and really did phrase it as a warning about being too busy. The sentence sounds like him because it is a copy of something he said. It simply is not the thing he said.

What gets lost in the copying is the part that did the work. Covey’s line is about time — refusing to let the work crowd out the maintenance that makes the work possible — and his parable puts the excuse into a character’s mouth so you can hear how ridiculous it sounds out loud. The rewrite turns a refusal into an oversight. We do not forget to sharpen the saw. Covey’s woodcutter knows exactly where the file is and says he is too busy.

“We must never become too busy sawing to take time to sharpen the saw.” — Stephen Covey’s actual sentence, in print since 1970

The paper trail behind Covey’s version

The aphorism is older in Covey’s work than most readers assume. It is not a 7 Habits invention: Open Library’s full-text search finds it in Spiritual Roots of Human Relations ↗, the book he published with Deseret Book in 1970, and it recurs across his later titles including The Divine Center, Principle-Centered Leadership and The Wisdom and Teachings of Stephen R. Covey, with small variations — “never become,” “never get” — that are Covey’s own.

The parable is the durable part. Its opening — coming “upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree” — is searchable in Covey’s own Renewal ↗ and has been reprinted in dozens of unrelated books on ministry, teaching, healthcare management and marketing, which is a fair measure of how far Habit 7 travelled.

The idea itself belongs to no one. Quote Investigator’s chronology of the axe version ↗ starts in 1944 with Reverend W. H. Alexander invoking an anonymous lumberjack who, given five minutes to fell a tree, would spend three of them sharpening. The Lincoln credit came later and has nothing behind it. Covey’s contribution was not the proverb but the frame he built around it.

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

Work Growth Wisdom

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Wikiquote: Stephen Coveyen.wikiquote.org

The anchor. Carries this exact wording in the Disputed section with no citation, under a note that the entries were transferred from a First Things First article and that many “have already been found to have been paraphrases, rather than exact quotations.” No sawing line appears in the page’s sourced sections.
Quote Origin: To Cut Down a Tree in Five Minutes Spend Three Minutes Sharpening Your Axequoteinvestigator.com

QI on the older, anonymous ancestor of the whole idea: earliest match 1944, Reverend W. H. Alexander crediting an anonymous lumberjack, and no substantive evidence for the Abraham Lincoln version. QI has not investigated the saw form or Covey.
Open Library full-text search: “so busy with sawing”openlibrary.org

The negative test that decides this page. Searching the phrase from the popular quotation across Open Library’s scanned-book corpus returns no matched text whatsoever.
Open Library full-text search: Covey’s sawing aphorismopenlibrary.org

The positive control, run on the core phrase so it catches Covey’s own variants (“never become,” “never get”): about 25 matches, including Spiritual Roots of Human Relations, The Divine Center, Principle-Centered Leadership, How to Succeed with People and The Wisdom and Teachings of Stephen R. Covey, plus Sean Covey titles reusing it and a scattering of unrelated books quoting him. Searching the sentence verbatim narrows it to about six scans, three of them the 1970 book itself.
Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw®www.franklincovey.com

Covey’s own company on the habit itself — confirming the name “Sharpen the Saw®” and the renewal framework of body, heart, mind and spirit. Notably, it gives a different Covey quotation and carries no woodcutter parable.
Stephen Covey — biographyen.wikipedia.org

Life dates (24 October 1932 – 16 July 2012), and the publication years used on this page: Spiritual Roots of Human Relations (1970, Deseret Book Company) and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989).

The name on the page

Who was Stephen Covey?

Stephen Covey

1932–2012 · American educator, businessman & motivational author

Stephen Richards Covey (24 October 1932 – 16 July 2012) was an American educator, businessman and motivational speaker whose 1989 book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People became one of the most widely read business books ever published. Long before it, he was writing for a Latter-day Saint readership — Spiritual Roots of Human Relations appeared from Deseret Book in 1970, and it already contains the sawing aphorism in the form he would use for the rest of his career. Habit 7, “Sharpen the Saw,” is what this quotation is reaching for: the argument that time spent renewing yourself is not time stolen from the work.

For writers & researchers

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Where the wording is documented

No source exists for the popular wording: Wikiquote, “Stephen Covey,” lists it under Disputed without citation, and Open Library’s full-text search returns no match. The closest documented original is Stephen R. Covey, Spiritual Roots of Human Relations (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1970): “We must never become too busy sawing to take time to sharpen the saw.” The parable form appears in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), Habit 7.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Often we are so busy with sawing that we forget to sharpen the saw’?” Last verified 25 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/often-we-are-so-busy-with-sawing-that-we-forget-to-sharpen/

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