The line belongs to Fay Zuliani in act 5 of Pinero’s 1897 comedy The Princess and the Butterfly; or, The Fantastics, where it is printed in broken-English dialect: “Dose who love deep never grow old … Dey may die of age, but dey die young.” Benjamin Franklin died in 1790, more than a century before the play was written, and Quote Investigator ↗ found the Franklin credit — which turns up in a 2001 wedding-vows book — unsupported by any substantive citation.
“Those Who Love Deeply Never Grow Old” Arthur Wing Pinero, "The Princess and the Butterfly; or, The Fantastics" (London: William Heinemann, 1898), act 5, p. 218: "Dose who love deep never grow old, I have 'eard it said. Dey may die of age, but dey die young." Not Benjamin Franklin — the popular wording is a smoothed-out later version of Pinero's line. Via Quotle.info
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Provenance
The source
Work
The Princess and the Butterfly; or, The Fantastics: A Comedy in Five Acts
Location
Act 5, page 218
First staged
St James’s Theatre, London, 25 March 1897; Lyceum Theatre, New York, 23 November 1897
Published
William Heinemann, London, 1898 — the copyright page of the Heinemann text reads “Copyright 1897”
SIR GEORGE.[Rising.] My dear, I am not a young man. FAY.[Slowly coming to the table.] Dose who love deep never grow old, I have ’eard it said. Dey may die of age, but dey die young. You ought to love de Princess.
Act 5, pp. 217–218
The nonstandard spelling is Pinero’s own: Fay Zuliani was born English — her mother was “a Miss Wentworth” — but took her stepfather’s name after the widowed mother married an Italian musician, and she has “lived all over the world.” Pinero’s stage direction gives her “an accent suggestive of many languages,” which the printed text renders throughout — “dose” for those, “dey” for they. Later in the same act the thought returns in standard English, when Sir George tells the Princess “That those who love deeply cannot age … Nor perceive age in those they love.”
1897 — the play. Pinero gives the line to Fay Zuliani in act 5 of The Princess and the Butterfly. It survives in the printed Heinemann text on page 218 ↗, in dialect, as a piece of hearsay wisdom offered to a man anxious about his age.
April 1897 — a critic notices it.Quote Investigator ↗ cites a drama review in the London periodical The Speaker that found Fay’s broken English memorable and reprinted the line, spelling and all.
December 1897 — the wording slips. Per Quote Investigator ↗, an advertisement for the New York run in The New York Times used the line as a catchphrase in tidied form: “Those who love deeply, never grow old.” The tidied wording is the one that went on to circulate.
1987–2013 — the author drops away, then is replaced.Quote Investigator ↗ documents “Dear Abby” printing it unattributed in 1987 and 1993, a 2001 wedding-vows book crediting Benjamin Franklin, and a 2013 Reader’s Digest collection crediting Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
✓Public domain
The play was staged in March 1897 and published in book form by William Heinemann of London, the printed text carrying a 1897 copyright notice. A work first published this long before 1931 is in the public domain in the United States, and Pinero, who died in 1934, wrote in English, so no translation copyright is involved. The quoted dialogue may be reproduced freely.
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
How Franklin got the credit
This is a line with a documented author, a documented page number and a documented date — and it still ended up under two other names, neither of which was ever supported by a citation.
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The attributionBenjamin Franklin No evidence
Franklin died on 17 April 1790, more than a century before Pinero’s play was staged in 1897, so he cannot be the author of a line first printed in it. Quote Investigator ↗ records the Franklin credit in a 2001 wedding-vows book and reports that the linkage was never supported with substantive citations. Wikiquote’s Franklin page ↗ does not carry the line at all.
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The attributionDorothy Canfield Fisher No evidence
A 2013 Reader’s Digest compilation of “Quotable Quotes” printed the saying under Fisher’s name. Quote Investigator ↗ found this credit, like the Franklin one, unsupported by substantive citations.
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A possible routeA book called “Poor Richard’s Anthology” Plausible confusion
A 1950 compilation, Poor Richard’s Anthology of Thoughts on Charity and Relative Subjects, printed the saying and credited Pinero correctly. Quote Investigator ↗ raises this as a possibility rather than a finding: the title “Poor Richard’s” is so closely bound to Franklin that an inattentive reader might have reassigned the line to him. Nobody has shown that this is what actually happened.
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The wordingThe famous version is not what Pinero wrote Smoothed
Pinero wrote the sentence in dialect for a character with, in his own stage direction, “an accent suggestive of many languages”: “Dose who love deep never grow old … Dey may die of age, but dey die young.” The circulating form uses “deeply” and “old age.” The shift began early — Quote Investigator ↗ cites a December 1897 New York Times advertisement for the play already printing “Those who love deeply, never grow old.”
✓Arthur Wing Pinero wrote it, for Fay Zuliani to say in act 5 of The Princess and the Butterfly (1897) — and you can read it on page 218 of the printed play ↗.
Context
Why this line travelled so far from its author
Pinero wrote the sentence for a nineteen-year-old girl to say to a man of forty-five who is nervous about proposing to a woman he loves. Sir George has just said, flatly, “My dear, I am not a young man” — and Fay Zuliani answers him with a piece of folk wisdom she frames as second-hand: she has ’eard it said. It is a consoling line about age, delivered in a broken-English accent, inside a five-act comedy about the terror of turning forty.
Detached from the play, the sentence became greeting-card material. Quote Investigator documents an advertisement for the New York run in December 1897 already smoothing “love deep” into “love deeply,” an actress from the original Lyceum company misremembering the line in 1922, and the “Dear Abby” column printing it in 1987 and again in 1993 with no author attached at all. A line circulating for decades without a name is a line waiting for one, and eventually two famous names arrived.
Fay does not claim the thought as her own. She says she has heard it said — and then the world spent a century deciding who had said it.
The same idea, said twice in the same play
Pinero liked the thought enough to return to it. Later in act 5, Sir George and the Princess repeat it in standard English rather than dialect — “That those who love deeply cannot age … Nor perceive age in those they love” — which is why a 1942 newspaper question-and-answer column, as Quote Investigator records, answered a reader’s query about the saying by pointing to that second, plainer version in act 5.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Sir Arthur Wing Pinero was an English playwright who began his career as an actor, and became one of the dominant figures of the late-Victorian and Edwardian London stage. He is best remembered for farces and society dramas including The Magistrate, The Second Mrs Tanqueray, Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ and The Gay Lord Quex; he was knighted in 1909. The Princess and the Butterfly (1897), the source of this line, is one of his comedies of manners — a play built around the fear of turning forty.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Arthur W. Pinero, The Princess and the Butterfly; or, The Fantastics: A Comedy in Five Acts (London: William Heinemann, 1898), act 5, 218. See also Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Those Who Love Deeply Never Grow Old,” January 16, 2015.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Those Who Love Deeply Never Grow Old’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/those-who-love-deeply-never-grow-old/