The quote database

Wrongly attributed

This is Will Durant, not Aristotle, and Durant is not translating -- he is summarising the Nicomachean Ethics in his own words and marking the difference by dropping the quotation marks he uses on either side of it. The nearest thing in Aristotle is that virtues are formed in a man by his doing the actions, which Durant does put in quotation marks in the same sentence. The memorable half is the half Durant wrote. It usually circulates with a therefore inserted and the excellence turned into a moral instruction, neither of which is in the book.

Wrongly attributed

The single most-shared sentence ever credited to Confucius, and it is an Irish novelist's. Goldsmith wrote it for the Public Ledger in 1760 and collected it in 1762, in a series of letters supposedly by a Chinese visitor. Letter VII opens with a headnote in Goldsmith's own hand: the Editor thinks proper to acquaint the reader that the greatest part of the following letter seems to him to be little more than a rhapsody of sentences borrowed from Confucius, the Chinese philosopher. Two paragraphs later the narrator says he holds the volume of Confucius in his hand. That framing is precisely how the line became Confucius's, and later Mandela's. Note also the comma after glory, which the popular version drops, and that Goldsmith wrote the same sentence again in Letter XXII with a different opening.

Wrongly attributed

Sold on posters as an ancient Chinese proverb and as Confucius, Lao Tzu or Maimonides by turns. Its first known appearance in English is this one, in a now-forgotten novel by Thackeray's daughter, published in 1885. What almost nobody quoting it knows is that even here it is second-hand: Max is not stating his own principle, he is guessing at what an absent character called the Patron meant. The wording is also not the familiar one. There is no feed him for a day and no feed him for a lifetime; there is an hour, and a good turn.

Wrongly attributed

Not Confucius. The line is from the Tao Teh King, a different book by a different school, traditionally ascribed to Laozi -- a figure whose very existence historians doubt. Two things drift in the popular version: li becomes miles, and commenced becomes begins with. Legge's 1891 translation, the standard English text for a century, says neither.

Wrongly attributed

Adlai Stevenson used a version of this in his eulogy for Eleanor Roosevelt in 1962, and it has been hers ever since; it is also sold as Confucius and as an old Chinese proverb. It is neither. It is W. L. Watkinson, the English Methodist preacher, in a sermon called The Invincible Strategy, printed in 1907 -- and he presents it as a saying already in circulation rather than as his own coinage. What is certain is that this is the earliest printed appearance anybody has produced, and it predates Roosevelt's public life.

Wrongly attributed

Character is destiny is routinely credited to Heraclitus, on the strength of a fragment usually given as a man's character is his fate. That translation is itself contested, and the English aphorism does not come from it: it comes from Novalis, and reached English readers through George Eliot, who quotes him here in 1860 and immediately qualifies it. The half everyone drops is the half Eliot wrote.

Wrongly attributed

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education is one of the most-quoted lines attributed to Mark Twain and appears nowhere in his published work, letters or notebooks. The idea's earliest known appearance in this form is Grant Allen's, in 1894. Twain was alive and famous; the sentence was simply reassigned to him afterwards, as hundreds of others have been.

Wrongly attributed

Attributed to Plato constantly, and to Philo of Alexandria almost as often; it is in neither. The words belong to John Watson, a Liverpool Presbyterian minister who wrote fiction as Ian Maclaren, and they are recorded here by his biographer and editor as his favourite motto. The popular form has been smoothed twice over: every one has become everyone you meet, and the earliest circulating version of the motto is not kind at all but pitiful, in the older sense of full of pity. Nothing in the record puts any form of it before the 1890s.

Wrongly attributed

Universally attributed to Emerson, and it is in none of his essays, journals or letters. It is Muriel Strode, an American writer almost nobody has heard of, in the August 1903 issue of The Open Court. The rewriting is the interesting part: Strode wrote a vow in the first person about herself, and the version that circulates has been turned into an instruction issued to somebody else. Do not go where the path may lead is not what she said. I will not follow is.

Wrongly attributed

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel is printed on university walls under Socrates's name. Socrates wrote nothing at all, and the sentence is not in Plato either. It is Plutarch, four hundred years later, in the Moralia essay usually called On Listening to Lectures -- and it is not an aphorism about education but a rebuke to a student who sits and admires the lecturer instead of thinking. Note what the tidy modern version loses: Plutarch does not say the mind is a flame to be kindled, he says it is not a pot, and that what it wants is fuel.

Wrongly attributed

Roosevelt did not coin this. He quotes it in his Autobiography and names its author: Squire Bill Widener of Widener's Valley, Virginia, a neighbour with no other claim on posterity. It is now printed on posters and mugs as Roosevelt's own, usually shortened to Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. The sentence around it is the evidence that it was never his.

Wrongly attributed

Usually quoted as Frankl's own: he who has a why to live can bear almost any how. Frankl never claimed it. He quotes Nietzsche in Man's Search for Meaning, and the line is Nietzsche's, from Twilight of the Idols in 1888. The familiar English wording matches no published translation of the period; Ludovici's 1911 rendering is the one above.