Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

http://theboard.byu.edu/questions/73123/

Stego Lily wrote:The quote comes from the Van Halen song "The Trouble with Never."

Is this the true origin for the quote or did Van Halen borrow it from someone else? It seems this may have been around a lot longer than a few years, but I can't find anything specific.

This is what I have so far:

2011 book title
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1036 ... ke-the-box

2007 thread title
http://www.yelp.com/topic/san-francisco ... first-time

2006 referencing quote used in airline commercial
http://completely-broke.blogspot.com/20 ... thing.html

2006ish? When was the last time you did something for the first time. Fly Emirates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirates_(airline)

It seems that search engines only give you the option to look at the last update over the last hour, last twentyfour hours, last year, and so forth. They ought to allow you to order the references from newest to oldest and oldest to newest. Just to satisfy those of us who want to find the oldest reference to something, and hopefully to the origin.

The oldest online reference I found to the exact quote is this. http://forum.virtualtourist.com/miscell ... -Time.html She got the quote from Brad Brown's motto.

Google scholar pulls up a 1997 book in which the author (a sports exec and motivational speaker) describes seeing the quote on a T-shirt:

As this book was being written, I took part in the twenty-seventh running of the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C., October 27, 1996. . . . The lady who started next to me was from Baltimore and was running her first marathon. She wore a T-shirt with a great message about taking risks and living the adventure: WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU DID SOMETHING FOR THE FIRST TIME? I loved it! What a great spirit was expressed in that question!

So, I think it's safe to say that this quote has been around for a while.

So, I actually saw a lot of those quotes when I was researching the question, with the earliest date being 1996. When I saw that it was in a Van Halen song, I foolishly assumed that it was a song from the 80s. Turns out Van Halen is still making music. Who knew?

Sometimes it helps to not know things. My first thought was, who is Van Halen, and when did he write that song?