beg, borrow, or steal

Obtain in any possible way. This saying appears in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (The Tale of the Man of Law, c. 1386): “Maugre [despite] thyn heed, thou most for indigence or stele, or begge, or borwe [borrow] thy despence [expenditure]!” In slightly different form it appears in a seventeenth-century poem with a cautionary moral that is quoted by Washington Irving (“But to beg or to borrow, or get a man’s own, ’tis the very worst world that ever was known”). Almost the same wording appeared in Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack (1742).