“Worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due”
“Worry—interest paid on trouble before it falls due” has been cited in print since at least March 1906. The saying is often credited to English author William Ralph Inge (1860-1954), but there is no evidence in his writings that he used the saying by 1906. The authorship of the saying is unknown.
Another financial proverb about “worry” is “Bull markets climb a wall of worry.”
Wikiquote: William Ralph Inge
William Ralph Inge (6 June 1860 – 26 February 1954), popularly referred to simply as Dean Inge, was an English author, Anglican prelate, professor of divinity at Cambridge, and Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral.
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Misattributed
Worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due.
. Attributed to Inge in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), which cites the London Observer, 14 February 1932. However, this aphorism was in circulation decades earlier, e.g., it features in an advertisement in The Grape Belt, 2 October 1906, p. 5
2 March 1906, Bedford (IN) Daily Mail, “Some Definitions,” pg. 3, col. 7:
Worry—interest paid on trouble before it falls due.
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—Saturday Evening Post.
Google News Archive
2 October 1906, The Grape Belt (Dunkirk, NY), pg. 5, col. 1 ad:
Worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due.
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D. Powers, The Fair Store, Westfield, N. Y.
14 July 1917, Riverside (CA) Daily Press, pg. 4, col. 4:
WORRY is interest paid on trouble before it falls due.
Google Books
Windows on Life
By Carl Heath Kopf
New York, NY: The Macmillan Company
1941
Pg. 12:
“Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due,” is Dean Inge’s way of saying what Mark Twain put more humorously, “I have had a great many troubles in my life, most of which never happened.”
Google Books
The Harper Book of Quotations
Edited by Robert I. Fitzhenry
New York, NY: HarperPerennial
1993
Pg. 40:
Anxiety is the interest paid on trouble before it is due.
Dean William R. Inge
Google Books
The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs
Edited by Charles Clay Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder and Fred R. Shapiro
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press
2012
Pp. 282-283:
Worry is interest paid on trouble before it is due.
1909 William Meade Pegram, Past-Times (Baltimore: John H. Saumenig) 120 (in a small collection of sayings—mostly not proverbial— titled “Proverbs”): “Worry—interest paid on trouble before it falls due.”