Who Said It: Philosophers and Proverbs
Philosophy is the category where translation does most of the damage. A line can be genuinely by Lao Tzu, genuinely famous and still not say in English what it says in the original.
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Where the translations go wrong
The best known line in this set is Lao Tzu's observation that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It is chapter 64 of the Tao Te Ching, it is genuinely his, and the standard English is a small distortion. The Chinese does not say a single step; it says something closer to beneath one's feet. The difference matters, because the English version is about starting, an encouragement to act, while the original is about location, a reminder that the journey is already where you are standing. Twenty five centuries of philosophy became a motivational poster in translation.
Nietzsche suffers a different distortion. “God is dead” is from The Gay Science and the full passage continues “God remains dead. And we have killed him.” It is not a triumphant announcement, which is how it is usually deployed; it is a description of a catastrophe, spoken by a madman in a marketplace who cannot make anyone understand what has happened. Our version keeps the longer form for exactly that reason.
A correction we made to this set. Until August 2026 this deck attributed “we are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit” to Aristotle, citing the Nicomachean Ethics. The sentiment is Aristotle’s, but the wording is Will Durant’s, from The Story of Philosophy in 1926, where he was summarising Aristotle in his own prose. Citing the Ethics as the source of a twentieth century paraphrase was wrong, so we replaced the entry with a line the Ethics actually contains. It is logged on our corrections page.
Hell is other people, and what Sartre meant
Jean-Paul Sartre's most famous line comes from the 1944 play No Exit, in which three characters are locked in a room together for eternity. It is almost always quoted as ordinary misanthropy, a witty complaint about how tiring people are. Sartre was asked about this directly and said it had been misunderstood: he did not mean that our relations with other people are always poisoned, but that we come to know ourselves through the judgement of others, so that if those relations are twisted, we become trapped in a false self-image. Hell is other people only when you have surrendered your self-knowledge to them.
The proverbs
| Line | Credited to |
|---|---|
| Fall seven times and stand up eight | Japanese proverb |
| The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago | Chinese proverb |
| The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it | Chinese proverb |
| If you want to go fast, go alone; to go far, go together | African proverb |
| The man who has confidence in himself gains the confidence of others | Hasidic proverb |
Five of the twenty one entries have no author, and that is a deliberate choice rather than a gap in our research. These lines circulate in English with a national label attached and no traceable origin, and in several cases the attribution itself is doubtful: the tree planting proverb is widely repeated as Chinese and has no known Chinese source. Labelling them as proverbs is more honest than inventing a philosopher, and it also makes them fair quiz questions, because the option list tells you a proverb is available.
The rest of the set
Aristotle, Plato and Socrates account for six entries between them, and the Socrates ones are worth a note: he wrote nothing at all, so every Socrates quotation is really Plato reporting him, or a later paraphrase. “The unexamined life is not worth living” is from Plato's Apology and is about as solid as an attribution to Socrates can be. “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing” is a popular condensation of the same argument rather than a translated line, which is why our data marks it as attributed.
The set closes with Kierkegaard, Simone de Beauvoir, Andre Gide and Confucius, whose two entries come from the Analects, the collection compiled by his students after his death. Like Socrates, Confucius is quoted through other people, and like Socrates he attracts a very large volume of invented material in English. If a line sounds like a fortune cookie, it usually is one.
Frequently asked questions
Did Aristotle say we are what we repeatedly do?
The sentiment is his, but the wording is Will Durant’s, from The Story of Philosophy in 1926, where Durant was summarising the Nicomachean Ethics in his own prose. We removed the entry that cited the Ethics for that wording.
What did Sartre mean by hell is other people?
Not that other people are unpleasant. He said the line had been misunderstood: we know ourselves through the judgement of others, so relations that are twisted trap us in a false self-image. It comes from the 1944 play No Exit.
Why are proverbs in a who-said-it quiz?
Because they circulate in English with a national label and no traceable author, and inventing a philosopher for them would be dishonest. The option list makes clear that a proverb is one of the answers.
Are Socrates quotes reliable?
Socrates wrote nothing, so every quotation is Plato reporting him or a later paraphrase. The line from the Apology is about as solid as it gets; the condensed popular versions are marked as attributed.
More Who Said It sets
- Scientists and inventors31 quotes from Einstein, Edison, Curie, Hawking and the Apollo 13 transmission everyone misquotes.
- Writers and poets52 lines from Wilde, Twain, Angelou, Orwell and Woolf, and the two authors everything gets credited to.
- Leaders and activists56 lines from Churchill, King, Mandela and Roosevelt, and the Voltaire quote Voltaire never wrote.
- Founders and business26 lines from Jobs, Gates, Sandberg, Ford and Disney, including the Apple line a copywriter wrote.
- Athletes and coaches23 lines from Ali, Jordan, Kobe, Gretzky and Lombardi, and who really wrote the butterfly line.
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