A post shared on Facebook claims author Mark Twain wrote, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”

Verdict: False

There is no evidence that Twain ever said or wrote this saying.

Fact Check:

Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, has become a popular figure for misattribution. The quote credited to him in the Facebook post is one such example. (RELATED: Did Ralph Waldo Emerson Say This Quote About ‘What Lies Within Us’?)

A search of his written body of work turned up no matching or similar expressions. It also does not appear in “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations” or the “Yale Book of Quotations.”

The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to several experts, none of whom thought the quote was Twain’s.

Quote Investigator, a website dedicated to researching the source of quotations, believes the saying attributed to the author of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” actually came from 18th-century French writer Nicolas Chamfort, though the wording varied slightly when translated from its original French. The quote, according to Quote Investigator, was first linked to Twain in 1988, over 70 years after his death.

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