Vol. 06 · Misquoted ·Scripture ·234 of 348
"Pride goes before a fall."
They never said that.
What people say
"Pride goes before a fall."
What was actually said
"Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." Solomon (traditional attribution) — Proverbs 16:18 (KJV, 1611)
Why it stuck
Modern English condenses the two parallel clauses into one. The original couples "pride" with "destruction," not "fall" — the fall is what the haughty spirit gets, not pride itself.
The Vulgate reads "Contritionem praecedit superbia," which the KJV translators rendered with deliberately Hebrew-flavoured parallelism.
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