eat one’s cake and have it, too, to

To have it both ways; to spend something and still possess it. This metaphor was already a proverb in the sixteenth century, included in John Heywood’s collection of 1546 (as “You cannot eat your cake and have your cake”) and has reappeared with great regularity ever since, probably because, as A. C. Benson wrote (From a Col- lege Window, 1907), “There still remains the intensely human instinct . . . the desire to eat one’s cake and also to have it.”