The line shows up on parenting Pinterest boards attributed to Rabindranath Tagore. Garson O’Toole’s research at Quote Investigator traces it back to an 1887 Boston compilation titled Gems of the Orient, where it appears as an anonymous saying attributed only to “Arabic or Rabbinic” origin. The Tagore attribution doesn’t appear until 2008 — a hundred and twenty years after the line is already in print, anonymous.