Few poets ever live to see international acclaim, but by 1850 Tupper was one of the world’s best-known poets. When he made his first visit to the United States in 1851, he was treated as a celebrity everywhere he went, and even feted at a White House dinner given in his honor by President Millard Fillmore.
The highlight of Tupper’s American trip was not the White House dinner, though, but his trip to Philadelphia. He visited all of the city’s major institutions, including the Philadelphia Hospital for the Insane. While on a tour of the facility given by hospital superintendent Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, Tupper noticed that copies of his “Never Give Up!” poem—but without his name—had been tacked to the door of every patient’s room. Tupper was honored, of course, and surmised that Dr. Kirkbride was simply paying tribute to his famous guest. Not so, it turns out. In fact, Dr. Kirkbride had no idea that the man he was escorting through the hospital had anything to do with the poem. It was one of the highlights of Tupper’s life, and one he eventually described in My Life as an Author (1886). Speaking about Dr. Kirkbride, he wrote in his memoirs:He had seen the verses, anonymous, in a newspaper, and judging them a good moral dose of hopefulness even for the half insane, placed them on every door to excellent effect. When to his astonishment he found the unknown author before him, greatly pleased, he asked if I would allow the patients to thank me; of course I complied, and soon was surrounded by kneeling and weeping and kissing folks, grateful for the good hope my verses had helped them to.
Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
Many people believe this saying has its origins in the tale about the Greeks and their Trojan horse, but it really stems from the age-old practice of estimating a horse’s age by examining its teeth. As horses—and humans—age, their gums begin to recede, giving the impression of longer teeth (hence the expression, “getting long in the tooth”). For several thousand years, horse traders have used this method to determine the value of a horse. The gift horse proverb is about good manners. When you receive a gift, you should be grateful for your good fortune instead of attempting to determine its value.
The proverb goes back to at least the Roman Empire. When Saint Jerome was writing biblical commentary around A.D. 400, he suggested that the saying was already very well established. In his Commentary on Epistle to Ephesians, he wrote: “Do not, as the common proverb says, look at the teeth of a gift horse.” In 1546, when John Heywood put together the first major collection of proverbs in the English language, he presented it this way: “No man ought to look a given horse in the mouth.” In his 1710 book Proverbs, Samuel Palmer presented the first neveristic version—and the one that has survived: Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
Never change horses in midstream.
This famous warning about altering a course of action while in the process of carrying it out sometimes begins Never swap horses. While the original author is unknown, the person responsible for popularizing the sentiment is very well known. In an 1864 speech to the National Union League, Abraham Lincoln was speaking about the possibility of running for a second term as president when he said:I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that “it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams.”
Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins.
This reminder about the value of seeing things from the perspective of others is often presented as a “Native American proverb,” and sometimes more specifically as an adage from the Sioux, Cherokee, or Nez Perce tribes. Never criticize is often used in place of never judge, and in some variations, the saying ends with until you have walked two moons in his moccasins. Almost all quotation researchers have concluded that this is not a genuine Native American saying, despite the common assertion. The underlying sentiment has also appeared in many other cultural traditions. In the Talmud, for example, Hillel advises, “Do not judge others until you stand in their place.”
Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.
In his Great Political Wit: Laughing (Almost) All the Way to the White House (1998), Bob Dole wrote that Bill Clinton considered this the best advice he got after becoming president. The admonition to avoid unnecessary disputes with newspaper publishers and journalists has been attributed to Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde, and many others, but the person who deserves credit for the original idea is Charles Brownson, a Republican congressman from Indiana (he served from 1951 till 1959). The first appearance of the saying in print was in the 1964 book My Indiana, in which author Irving Leibowitz wrote:Former Congressman Charles Brownson, Indianapolis Republican, used to say, “I never quarrel with a man who buys ink by the barrel.”
When phrased as an admonition, the saying often appears with the words “and newsprint by the ton” added at the end. In 1978, the Wall Street Journal presented another variant (“Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel”) and called it “Greener’s Law,” after William Greener, a deputy press secretary to President Gerald Ford. (Greener claimed authorship, but it’s now clear the saying preceded him.) When Tommy Lasorda was managing the Los Angeles Dodgers, he applied the concept to sportswriters when he said, “Never argue with people who buy ink by the gallon.”
Never cry over spilt milk.
This saying has long reminded people to waste no time shedding tears over past errors and mistakes. It has its origins in “No weeping for shed milk,” which first appeared in print in James Howell’s Proverbs (1659). The proverb evolved into “There’s no use crying over spilt milk,” and ultimately into the current saying. Some quotation anthologies cite Sophocles as the original author of the sentiment (“There is no sense in crying over spilt milk. Why bewail what is done and cannot be recalled?”), but there is no evidence he ever wrote such a thing. The saying has also inspired these parodies:
Never cry over spilt milk. It could have been whiskey.JAMES GARNER, quoting his dad in a Maverick episode
If you must cry over spilt milk, condense it.EVAN ESAR
Never cry over spilt milk, because it might have been poisoned.W. C. FIELDS
Never judge a book by its cover.
According to the Yale Book of Quotations, this saying first appeared in exactly this way in an 1894 issue of a Minnesota newspaper, the Freeborn Country Standard. Its origins, however, can be traced to an eighteenth-century German proverb: “We must not judge of a book by its title page.” That saying was so well established in Europe in the late 1700s that everybody clearly understood what the English barrister William Roberts meant when he wrote (under a pseudonym) in a 1792 issue of The Looker-On: “I would as soon pretend to judge of a book by its title-page, as pronounce upon my neighbor’s disposition or genius from the shape of his features.” The saying Never judge a book by its cover literally means what it says, but it has also figuratively evolved to mean never judge by external appearances. The saying has inspired a popular spin-off from the writer Fran Lebowitz: “Never judge a cover by its book.”