The complete collection

The quote database

Every quote we hold, 1549 of them from 213 people across 387 works. Filter it, sort it, and follow any citation back to the source.
1529 checked at source

Filter the collection

1
Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.

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.

2
If a man knows the wherefore of his existence, then the manner of it can take care of itself.

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.