Live without pretending, love without depending, listen without defending, speak without offending

Despite its heavy circulation under Drake's name, we found nothing in his discography, interviews, or verified social accounts to support the credit, and one popular claim that the lines come from his song "The Motto" is simply false — that song's lyrics are unrelated. The words are in fact the opening of a longer six-line poem — continuing "Give without ending, Build without rending" — credited to Nina Roberta Baker, and it appears in print that way in Stephen M. Judah's 2006 relationship book "Staying Together When an Affair Pulls You Apart" and again in Melinda Blau and Tracy Hogg's "Family Whispering" (2014). That 2006 publication predates Drake's emergence as a mainstream artist and attributes the verse to someone else, while the "Drake" version is merely a clipped four-line excerpt passed around greeting-card and quote sites. Because a named earlier author and a dated, documented prior use both exist, the Drake attribution does not hold up. We therefore record this as misattributed, with the caveat that the fuller poem's earliest origin and Baker's own biography remain only lightly documented.