44 Famous Misattributed Quotes

Quotes have a unique power to inspire, motivate, and resonate deeply with us. However, sometimes the most famous quotes are attributed to the wrong individuals, creating an enticing mix of myth and mystery in the world of words. Despite their questionable origins, these misattributed quotes continue to find their way into speeches, literature, and daily conversations. Our fascination with them is rooted not only in their wisdom and eloquence but also in the enigmatic stories of how they became entangled with the legacies of prominent figures. Join us as we delve into a curated collection of the top 44 famous misattributed quotes and uncover the surprising truths behind these mistakenly credited words of wisdom.

1. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” - John Philpot Curran

2. “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” - George Eliot

3. “The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.” - Karl Marx

4. “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” - Jimi Hendrix

5. “People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.” - Alan Moore

6. “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” - Rumi

7. “When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.” - Abraham Lincoln

8. “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.” - Alexis de Tocqueville

9. “There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.” - Ronald Reagan

10. “Things are in the saddle,And ride mankind.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

11. “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.” - Taylor Caldwell

12. “Wanting to be someone else is a waste of who you are” - Kurt Cobain

13. “When you blame others, you give up your power to change.” - Robert Anthony

14. “There is another world, but it is in this one.” - William Butler Yeats

15. “But the real way to get happiness is by giving out happiness to other people. Try and leave this world a little better than you found it and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate you have not wasted your time but have done your best.” - Baden Powell

16. “Never leave till tomorrow that which you can do today.” - Benjamin Franklin

17. “To insist on a spiritual practice that served you in the past is to carry the raft on your back after you have crossed the river.” - Gautama Buddha

18. “There has to be evil so that good can prove its purity above it.” - Gautama Buddha

19. “If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” - Ray Bradbury

20. “Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.” - Joseph Fort Newton

21. “When you're at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on.” - Theodore Roosevelt

22. “Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.” - William Barclay

23. “A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.” - E. M. Forster

24. “You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

25. “All descriptions of reality are temporary hypotheses.” - Siddhārtha Gautama

26. “Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny.” - C.S. Lewis

27. “Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo.” - Wade Davis

28. “I come here with no expectations, only to profess, now that I am at liberty to do so, that my heart is and always will be...yours.” - Jane Austen

29. “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” - George Bernard Shaw

30. “I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” - Dorothy Parker

31. “Let every man shovel out his own snow, and the whole city will be passable," said Gamache. Seeing Beauvoir's puzzled expression he added, "Emerson.""Lake and Palmer?""Ralph and Waldo.” - Louise Penny

32. “Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.” - Marilyn Monroe

33. “Always give without remembering and always receive without forgetting.” - Brian Tracy

34. “You can't buy happiness” - Kurt Cobain

35. “To become vegetarian is to step towards the stream which leads to nirvana.” - Siddhārtha Gautama

36. “In the end, it's not going to matter how many breaths you took,but how many moments took your breath away.” - Shing Xiong

37. “Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.” - Anne Frank

38. “When we look at modern man, we have to face the fact...that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to his scientific and technological abundance; We've learned to fly the air like birds, we've learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we haven't learned to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters...” - Martin Luther King Jr.

39. “I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.” - Albert Einstein

40. “When EVIL men make bad laws, righteous men disobey them." Pastor Butch Paugh” - Tarrin P. Lupo

41. “If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.” - Lao Tzu

42. “Enjoy life. There's plenty of time to be dead.” - Hans Christian Andersen

43. “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” - Rumi

44. “If I could live again - I will travel light,If I could live again - I'll try to work bare feetat the beginning of spring tillthe end of autumn,I'll ride more carts,I'll watch more sunrises...” - Jorge Luis Borges