Last reviewed 19 October 2026.

Why a charity checks its quotes

Because an enormous share of what circulates is wrong, and the errors are not random. They drift in one direction: toward telling you that your suffering is a lesson, a choice, or a measure of your strength. Those are the ones that get printed on things and handed to grieving people.

Five of the ten below are real, quoted from translations old enough to be out of copyright, with the source named so you can go and check us. Five are famous lines that the named person never wrote — and in every case the real story is better than the slogan.

Five that are real

1. On getting out of bed

“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present — I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world?”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 5, section 1. Translated by George Long, 1862.

What it actually is. Not advice. The Meditations was a private notebook, never written for anyone to read — this is a man arguing with himself at dawn and losing. The passage carries on into real self-reproach. He is not someone who finds mornings easy; he is someone who has to talk himself into them.

What is worth knowing. Marcus and his wife had at least thirteen children, and at least four of them died before he did, several as infants. The man writing about rising to the work of a human being had buried children. He does not mention it here. That is rather the point.

2. On not being able to get away

“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, and mountains… But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 4, section 3. Translated by George Long, 1862.

What it actually is. He wrote this in a military camp on the Danube frontier, on campaign, where a house by the sea was not available to him at any price. It is the consolation of a man who cannot leave.

The bit usually cut. The line is normally cropped to “retire into thyself,” which loses the sharpness — a mark of the most common sort of men. He is being hard on himself for wanting a holiday, not offering you a technique.

3. On the dead staying with you

“To me, the thought of my dead friends is sweet and appealing. For I have had them as if I should one day lose them; I have lost them as if I have them still.”

Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 63, section 7. Translated by Richard Mott Gummere, 1917.

Why this is the most useful thing on the page. Earlier in the same letter, Seneca lays down a grief timetable. He approves of the Roman custom allowing women one year of mourning — not because they needed it, he says, but so that they would mourn no longer. For men, no limit is set, because mourning at all was not thought honorable.

Then, a few lines later, he admits he broke his own rule. He writes that he wept so excessively for his friend Annaeus Serenus that he must be counted among the men overcome by grief. And he gives the reason: he had never imagined it possible that his friend's death would come before his own — as if the Fates kept to the order of our ages.

That is a bereaved parent's exact experience, written down in the first century, by the man who invented the deadline. If somebody has told you that you are taking too long, this is the oldest available evidence that the person who first said it could not do it either.

4. For the friend who does not know what to do

“Do not, however, hesitate to sympathize with him so far as words go, and, if occasion offers, even to groan with him.”

Epictetus, The Encheiridion, section 16. Translated by W. A. Oldfather, 1928.

This one is for the friend, not the grieving person — and it is close to two thousand years old. Sit down. Say something. Make the sound of it with them. Almost nobody knows a Stoic wrote that.

And here is what we are not going to hide. The first half of the same passage says that a weeping man is not distressed by what happened to him but by “his judgement about it,” and warns the comforter not to groan “in the centre of your being.” We think that half is wrong, and we will not print it as comfort. Stoic writing on losing a child is much colder than the modern brand suggests — elsewhere Epictetus says that a man kissing his child should whisper to himself that the child may die tomorrow. The useful sentence is real. So is the rest of it, and you should know it is there.

5. On whether a thing that ends was real

“Every form you see has its archetype in the placeless world; / If the form perished, no matter, since its original is everlasting. / Every fair shape you have seen, every deep saying you have heard, / Be not cast down that it perished; for that is not so.”

Rumi, Selected Poems from the Dîvâni Shamsi Tabrîz, Ode XII. Translated by Reynold A. Nicholson, 1898.

This is a real translation, by a man who read Persian. That is worth saying because most of the Rumi you have met is not. Nicholson was Professor of Arabic at Cambridge. The Rumi on the internet is overwhelmingly Coleman Barks, who does not read Persian and works from other scholars' literal translations — he called his own output versions, though later book covers relabelled them translations. His work is also still in copyright, so we could not print it here even if we wanted to.

What it actually claims. Less than it seems, and more honestly. This is a metaphysical argument, not an emotional one — the pattern outlasts the instance. It does not say you should feel better. The ode goes on to tell the reader to put grief out of their head, and we have stopped the quotation before that, deliberately. We are not going to hand you a poem that instructs you how to feel.

Five that were never said

6. “Be the change you wish to see in the world”

Pinned on: Mahatma Gandhi. On mugs, bumper stickers and school walls worldwide.

What the evidence shows. Gandhi died in 1948. The earliest known appearance of the saying is 1974 — twenty-six years later — in a chapter called “The Love Project” by an American high-school teacher named Arleen Lorrance. Her wording was one way to start a preventative program is to be the change you want to see happen. It spread through the 1970s as one of six “Love Project Principles.” The first known attribution to Gandhi is 1987, in a Santa Fe newspaper. The Yale Book of Quotations records that the Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence has not traced it in his writings.

What Gandhi actually wrote, in 1913. “We but mirror the world… If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme… We need not wait to see what others do.”

Longer, stranger and better than the slogan — and that last line is a cleaner statement of why people volunteer than anything on a mug.

7. “The mind is everything. What you think, you become.”

Pinned on: the Buddha.

What the evidence shows. It is not in the Pali canon. The earliest known source is Ralph Waldo Trine's In Tune with the Infinite, 1897 — an American New Thought bestseller, in which Trine simply asserts that the Buddha said it, with no citation. Trine is not the author of the line so much as the origin of the mistake, and the mistake is at least 128 years old.

What the text actually says. The verses usually offered as its source are the opening of the Dhammapada, and even in Max Müller's 1881 translation they say something different: “All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.” The nearest canonical statement elsewhere is about which habits of attention a mind falls into — not about becoming your thoughts.

Why this correction matters more than the others. “What you think, you become” shades easily into the idea that a grieving person is generating their own suffering. Most bereaved parents have been told some version of that. Showing that the Buddha did not say it takes the weapon away.

8. “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive…”

Pinned on: Marcus Aurelius, usually “from the Meditations.”

It is in no translation of the Meditations, because he never wrote it. It traces to Elbert Hubbard, the American New Thought writer, in his own magazine The Fra in 1913 — where he offered it not as a quotation but as his own summary of what he thought Epictetus and Marcus taught. Somewhere in the century since, the paraphrase lost its quotation marks and acquired an emperor.

Read it next to the real one. Entry 1 on this page is what Marcus actually wrote about waking up, and it is the opposite in temper: reluctant, unwilling, and doing it anyway. One is a man dragging himself out of bed. The other is a magazine telling you to feel privileged. If you only take one thing from this room, take that comparison.

9. “God won't give you more than you can handle”

Pinned on: the Bible. Said to bereaved parents constantly, often at the funeral.

It is not in the Bible, in any translation. The verse behind it is 1 Corinthians 10:13, and it is about temptation — the promise is a way out of being tempted to do wrong. It makes no claim at all about grief, or about matching loss to a person's capacity.

And the same author says the opposite about suffering. In 2 Corinthians 1:8, Paul writes that in Asia he and his companions were “pressed out of measure, above strength, insomuch that we despaired even of life.”

Above strength. The apostle whose sentence the cliché was built from states plainly that he was given more than he could bear. If somebody has said this to you, it is not scripture, and the man they are half-quoting would not have said it to you either.

10. “What we do now echoes in eternity”

Pinned on: Marcus Aurelius.

It is a line from the film Gladiator (2000), spoken by Russell Crowe's character, not by the emperor — one of several Gladiator lines now circulating as ancient philosophy. The philosopher Gregory Sadler has catalogued them.

We like the film. It is simply not a primary source, and a quote page that cannot tell the difference between a Roman emperor and a screenwriter cannot be trusted on anything else either.

What we will not print

Some of what these writers said about losing a child is genuinely cold, and we are not going to launder it into comfort. Seneca's instruction that it is better to replace a friend than to weep for him, and his line that grief which becomes chronic is rightly ridiculed, are not going on this page as consolation. Nor is the passage where Epictetus judges Odysseus for weeping.

We will quote them when the point is that they were wrong. We will never quote them as though they were right.

Common questions

How do you check a quote?

We find the oldest published source we can reach and read the actual page — a scan, a manuscript transcription, or a full e-text of a named translation — rather than trusting a quote site. Then we name the translator and the year on the page, so you can check us. Where a line cannot be traced to a primary text, it does not go up, or it goes up as a correction.

Why are the translations so old-fashioned?

Because those are the ones we are allowed to print. A translation is its own copyrighted work — the modern Marcus Aurelius everybody quotes is Gregory Hays, 2002, and we cannot reproduce a word of it. George Long's 1862 version is out of copyright, so it is the one you get. It is stiffer and it is also closer to the grain of the thing.

Do you only use ancient sources?

For now, mostly — for the same copyright reason. We can name a living writer and point you at their book, but we cannot reprint them. If a modern line has helped you and it is not here, that is probably why.

Is this room religious?

No. There is a Roman emperor, a Persian poet, a Sufi mystic, an Indian independence leader and a line of Paul's on this page, and the only test any of them had to pass was whether they actually said it. We quote scripture here the way we quote everything else — by checking what it says.

What if you have got one wrong?

Then tell us and we will publish the correction, the same way we published these. A room built on checking has to be the easiest room on the internet to correct.

How often does this room grow?

Ten new entries a week. Every one checked the same way. Nothing goes up because it sounds good.

More from this shelf

The Quiet Corner — every guide we have written, free, no sign-up.
The Shelf — twenty books and recordings, sorted by how far along you are.
The Music Room — one hundred songs, sorted by what the moment needs.
The Movie Room — one hundred films, and which ones will ambush you.

How to tell if a charity deserves your money

We publish the test we use on ourselves, including the parts we do not pass yet. Read it here — it is not about us, it is about how to check anybody, including us.

If tonight is bad

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988, any time, anywhere in the United States.
Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741.

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