The line began life as a textbook definition: “Climate is what on an average we may expect, weather is what we actually get,” from Herbertson’s Outlines of Physiography (London: Edward Arnold, 1901). Quote Investigator ↗ credits Herbertson and reports that “there is no substantive evidence that Twain wrote or said the remark” — the compact modern wording most people recite comes instead from Robert A. Heinlein’s 1973 novel Time Enough for Love.
“The Climate Is What You Expect; The Weather Is What You Get” A. J. Herbertson, Outlines of Physiography (London: Edward Arnold, 1901). Widely misattributed to Mark Twain, who never wrote it; the compact modern wording appears in Robert A. Heinlein's Time Enough for Love (1973). Via quotle.info · Verbatim: “Climate is what on an average we may expect, weather is what we actually get.”
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Evoking the world of Andrew John Herbertson — Scottish geographer and Oxford's first Professor of Geography. Theme: "The Climate Is What You Expect; The Weather Is What You Get". 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
The 1901 textbook where it starts
Work
Outlines of Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of the Earth
Author
A. J. Herbertson
First published
London: Edward Arnold, 1901
Location
Chapter XII, “Climate and Weather”
By climate we mean the average weather as ascertained by many years’ observations. Climate also takes into account the extreme weather experienced during that period. Climate is what on an average we may expect, weather is what we actually get.
Transcribed from the Internet Archive’s scan of the revised third edition, where the passage opens Chapter XII, “Climate and Weather.” A February 1902 review of the 1901 edition in The Geographical Teacher quotes the same sentence, which is how the wording is anchored to the first edition.
1887 — Mark Twain’s commentary on Caroline B. Le Row’s collection of genuine exam answers, reprinted from The Century Magazine, includes a pupil’s howler: “Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days.” Same joke, different sentence — and the words are the schoolchild’s, not Twain’s. Read it at Project Gutenberg ↗
1901 — A. J. Herbertson, then a reader in geography at Oxford, defines the pair in Outlines of Physiography: “Climate is what on an average we may expect, weather is what we actually get.” Internet Archive scan ↗
1902 — A review of the textbook in The Geographical Teacher (vol. 1, no. 2, p. 95) quotes the sentence back, spreading it beyond the classroom. Garson O’Toole’s ADS-L posting of the citation ↗
1973 — Robert A. Heinlein prints the aphorism in its modern, stripped-down form in Time Enough for Love, in “Second Intermission: More from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long,” page 352 — more than seventy years after Herbertson. Wikiquote’s sourced entry ↗
✓Public domain
Herbertson’s Outlines of Physiography was first published by Edward Arnold in London in 1901, so its text is in the public domain in the United States and the sentence above can be quoted freely. One caution: the pared-down wording that circulates today is the one printed in Robert A. Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love (1973), a novel still under copyright — Herbertson’s longer original is the version that is unambiguously free.
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
Often misattributed
Mark Twain is the internet’s house signature for any tidy line about the weather, and this one has been filed under his name by quote aggregators for years — always without a source. Two names get tangled up here, and only one of them is entirely innocent.
✕
The usual creditMark Twain No evidence
Aggregator pages list the line under Twain with no citation attached. Quote Investigator ↗ states that “there is no substantive evidence that Twain wrote or said the remark.” What Twain actually did, in 1887, was reprint a pupil’s examination answer — “Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days” — in his commentary on Caroline B. Le Row’s English as She Is Taught. The sentence sits in a list of schoolchildren’s blunders ↗; it is the child’s joke, not Twain’s, and it is not this saying.
✕
The popularizerRobert A. Heinlein Half right
Heinlein genuinely printed the aphorism in Time Enough for Love (1973), at page 352 of “Second Intermission: More from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long” — Wikiquote sources it there ↗. But he was writing more than seventy years after Herbertson’s textbook, and Quote Investigator treats him as the saying’s important populariser rather than its author. Crediting Heinlein with the idea overshoots; crediting him with today’s wording is fair.
It was never meant to be witty. Herbertson was writing a schoolbook, and he needed a way to stop pupils confusing two words that describe the same sky on different timescales. Chapter XII opens with the plodding version — climate is the average weather as ascertained by many years’ observations — and then, almost as an afterthought, delivers the clause that outlived the book: what we may expect, against what we actually get.
The reason it travels is that the distinction it draws is the one every argument about a cold week or a freak heatwave keeps getting wrong. A century after Herbertson wrote it for schoolchildren, atmospheric scientists were still reaching for it in public talks — and it had picked up two more famous names along the way, one who popularised it and one who had nothing to do with it at all.
Climate is what on an average we may expect, weather is what we actually get.
Why you see the line with ‘you’ and with ‘we’
The two pronouns come from two different transcriptions of the same page. Wikiquote’s sourced entry ↗ gives Heinlein’s line as “Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get,” at page 352. Quote Investigator ↗ transcribes the same page of a 1988 Ace reprint as “Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.” Both forms are in wide circulation. Herbertson’s original, the version anchored to a public-domain source, uses ‘we’.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1865–1915 · Scottish geographer and Oxford’s first Professor of Geography
Born in Galashiels and trained partly at the meteorological observatory on Ben Nevis, Herbertson came to Oxford as a reader in geography in 1899 and became the university’s first Professor of Geography in 1905, heading its geography department from 1910. Academically he is remembered for his scheme of the world’s natural regions, but his widest reach came through school textbooks like Outlines of Physiography, written to explain the physical world plainly to children. He died of a heart attack in Buckinghamshire in 1915, almost certainly never knowing that one clause from Chapter XII would outlast everything else he wrote.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
A. J. Herbertson, Outlines of Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of the Earth (London: Edward Arnold, 1901), chap. 12, “Climate and Weather.” Earliest documented instance of the adage per Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: The Climate Is What You Expect; The Weather Is What You Get,” 24 June 2012. Compact modern wording: Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973), 352.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The Climate Is What You Expect; The Weather Is What You Get’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-climate-is-what-you-expect-the-weather-is-what-you-get/