Quote Investigator ↗ traces this saying to the Rev. William Nevins, whose posthumous Select Remains (New York: J. S. Taylor, 1836) has it on page 383 as “We should judge ourselves by our motives, but others by their actions.” Covey did print a close cousin — “We then judge ourselves by our motives—and others by their behavior” — in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families (1997), page 40, and QI notes it appears there “without attribution.” The version now circulating under his name swaps his “motives” for “intentions” and matches no documented source at all.
“We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior” Rev. William Nevins, Select Remains of the Rev. William Nevins (New York: J. S. Taylor, 1836), p. 383. The popular "intentions … behavior" wording is unsourced; the nearest documented version is Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families (1997), p. 40: "We then judge ourselves by our motives—and others by their behavior." Via quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Stephen Covey. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Provenance
The 1836 original
Earliest documented source
Select Remains of the Rev. William Nevins, with a Memoir
First published
1836 · J. S. Taylor, New York · quoted at page 383
Covey’s version
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, 1997, page 40 — “motives,” not “intentions”
Popular wording
Unsourced — matches none of the dated citations on record
In judging ourselves, we cannot be too severe; in judging others, we cannot be too candid. We should judge ourselves by our motives, but others by their actions.
1836 · page 383
As transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗ from page 383 of the 1836 volume. Note the nouns: “motives” and “actions” — not “intentions” and “behavior.”
How “motives / actions” became “intentions / behavior”
1836 — the earliest version Quote Investigator ↗ documents appears in the posthumous Select Remains of the Rev. William Nevins (J. S. Taylor, New York), page 383: “We should judge ourselves by our motives, but others by their actions.” The full volume is scanned ↗ at the Internet Archive.
1885 — the word “intentions” enters the family in Edward Wigglesworth’s Reflections (Press of George H. Ellis, Boston), page 10: “we judge others by their doings, but ourselves by our intentions,” per QI’s chronology ↗ — forty-seven years before Stephen Covey was born.
1930 — Dwight Morrow, then U.S. Ambassador to Mexico ↗, gave the saying its modern celebrity: “We are too prone to judge ourselves by our ideals and other people by their acts,” reported in The New York Times and transcribed by QI ↗.
1997 — Stephen Covey prints the closest thing to the popular wording, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families (Golden Books), page 40: “We then judge ourselves by our motives—and others by their behavior.” QI notes ↗ it is given “without attribution” — no source named, which is how a saying 161 years older than the book came to carry his name.
The 1836 Nevins volume is long out of copyright — the Internet Archive scan ↗ is catalogued as not in copyright, with no visible notice and a stated date of 1836. But the wording people actually circulate is not the 1836 wording: its nearest documented match is Stephen Covey’s 1997 sentence in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, which remains in copyright to his estate and publishers, and the exact popular phrasing matches no source on record. No rights status can honestly be asserted for the line as quoted.
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
Three men get the credit. None wrote this sentence.
This is a 190-year-old saying wearing a modern name. The credit has moved three times, and each holder used different words than the ones you have just read.
✕
The usual modern creditStephen Covey reworded
Covey really did print a close version — in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families (Golden Books, 1997), page 40, under “Habit 1: Be Proactive.” But he wrote “We then judge ourselves by our motives—and others by their behavior,” and QI records ↗ that the sentence appears there “without attribution.” The line credited to him today drops his opening “We then” and swaps “motives” for “intentions.”
~
Popularizer, not authorDwight Morrow popularized
In 1930 the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico said “We are too prone to judge ourselves by our ideals and other people by their acts. All of us are entitled to be judged by both” — reported in The New York Times and transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗. Different nouns, and 94 years after Nevins.
✕
Second-hand creditHarold Nicolson amplified
Nicolson’s 1935 biography Dwight Morrow (Harcourt, Brace) carried the line at pages 50–51 as “we are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their acts” and credited Morrow for it. Reader’s Digest reprinted it in May 1936 and the credit slid onto Nicolson — misspelled “Nicholson,” a slip that stuck, as QI documents ↗.
✓The earliest documented version is Rev. William Nevins’s, in 1836: “We should judge ourselves by our motives, but others by their actions.” Quote Investigator ↗ credits Nevins and traces the drift to “intentions” and “behavior” through nearly two centuries of sermons, newspapers and quotation books — concluding that later writers were “making incremental changes to an established family of statements.”
Context
Why the sentence keeps changing
The idea has been in continuous circulation since the 1830s, and it has quietly changed jobs along the way. Quote Investigator observes that Nevins framed it as an instruction — we should judge ourselves by our motives and others by their actions — an ethical rule for a churchgoing reader. The modern version has flipped the mood entirely: it now describes a bias we cannot help, a diagnosis rather than a duty.
That flip is why the line is so quotable in a management book, a sermon, or a LinkedIn post, and also why it drifts. Every generation re-words it to suit the point it wants to make, so the nouns keep migrating: motives, ideals, intentions, capability on one side; actions, acts, deeds, doings, behavior on the other.
Nevins wrote a rule. We turned it into a diagnosis.
The drift, in QI’s own chronology
QI’s chronology ↗ lays out the mutation: “motives … actions” in 1836, reprinted in Friends’ Review in 1862 and in Tryon Edwards’s Light for the Day in 1877; “doings … intentions” in Edward Wigglesworth’s Reflections (Boston, 1885); “ideals … acts” from Dwight Morrow in 1930; and finally “motives … behavior” from Covey in 1997.
The word “behavior” is the tell. Of the dated citations QI documents, it turns up only in Covey’s 1997 sentence — which is why the popular line reads like Covey, even though the thought is not his and the noun “intentions” was in print by 1885, decades before he was born.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1797–1835 · American minister and religious writer
Nevins was an American minister and religious writer whose sermons and reflections circulated widely in the northeastern United States. He died in 1835; the following year his papers were gathered into Select Remains of the Rev. William Nevins, with a Memoir (New York: J. S. Taylor, 1836), and it is on page 383 of that posthumous volume that Quote Investigator finds the earliest form of this saying. He is not a famous man — which is precisely why the line kept getting reassigned to famous ones.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Chicago
William Nevins, Select Remains of the Rev. William Nevins, with a Memoir (New York: J. S. Taylor, 1836), 383: “We should judge ourselves by our motives, but others by their actions.” Identified as the earliest documented version in Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: We Are Too Prone to Judge Ourselves by Our Ideals and Other People by Their Acts,” March 19, 2015. The wording “We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior” appears in no documented source; the nearest is Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families (New York: Golden Books, 1997), 40: “We then judge ourselves by our motives—and others by their behavior.”
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior’?” Last verified 30 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/we-judge-ourselves-by-our-intentions-and-others-by-their/