“Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”
No Persian original has been identified in the Masnavi, the Divan-e Shams or the discourses. The line surfaces only in recent English-language collections and social media.
Attribution Check
Quotes People Get Wrong
Most of the spiritual quotations circulating in English were never said by the person whose name is under them. Some belong to somebody else. Some are a translator's own sentence. Some were invented outright and given a famous author because a famous author makes a graphic travel further.
This is a running list of the ones we keep meeting — 38 so far, of which 33 do not survive checking. Each entry says what is actually wrong with it and where the real words are, when real words exist. A few check out completely; those are here too, because a list that only says "fake" teaches you nothing about how to tell.
38 entries
“What you seek is seeking you.”
A Coleman Barks version. Barks does not read Persian and works from earlier English translations, producing what he calls versions rather than translations. The compression is his.
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
Also Barks. The underlying image exists in Rumi, but this seven-word English sentence is a modern rendering, not a translation of a locatable couplet.
“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”
Barks again. Rozina Ali documented in The New Yorker (5 January 2017) how this style of rendering strips the Quranic register that saturates Rumi's Persian.
“The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.”
Circulated as a Baba Ram Dass slogan in the early 1970s, well before it was attached to Rumi. No Persian source.
“The mind is everything. What you think you become.”
Not in the Pali Canon. Reads as a loose gloss on the opening verses of the Dhammapada, which say something considerably more specific about mental action preceding all states.
“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”
A modern formulation. The Canon's nearest parallel (AN 7.64 and related passages) uses different imagery entirely. Documented at length by Bodhipaksa's Fake Buddha Quotes project.
“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”
No source in the Pali Canon or in the Chinese Agamas. Earliest appearances are twentieth-century English.
“Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.”
Untraceable to any canonical text. The sentiment is broadly Buddhist; the sentence is not.
“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
Not a Buddhist proverb. The earliest English appearances are in late nineteenth-century Theosophical writing, from which it entered general circulation.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Not verbatim in the Collected Works. The genuine passage is Aion, CW 9ii, para. 126: 'when an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.' The popular version is smoother and more motivational than what he wrote.
“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
From a letter of 1959. One of the few widely shared Jung lines that is exactly his.
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
No source has ever been produced in twenty volumes of Collected Works, the letters, the seminars or the autobiography.
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Absent from his collected writings. The closest genuine passage, from 1913, is longer and makes a different point about a person changing their own nature rather than the world's tendencies.
“Everything is energy and that's all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want.”
A fabrication that circulates almost exclusively in manifestation content. It appears nowhere in Einstein's papers, letters or interviews, and the physics it asserts is not his.
“If you love somebody, let them go. If they return, they were always yours.”
Not in The Prophet, The Madman, The Broken Wings or the Arabic works. It circulated as an anonymous saying before his name was attached to it.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”
Written by Marianne Williamson in A Return to Love (1992). It is not in Mandela's 1994 inaugural address, and he never claimed it. One of the most durable misattributions in circulation.
“Watch your thoughts, they become words. Watch your words, they become actions.”
Attributed variously to Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher's father. The earliest located printing is a 1977 newspaper column crediting one Frank Outlaw.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
Genuine chapter 64 of the Tao Te Ching, but the Chinese is closer to 'begins beneath one's feet.' The received English turns a line about where you already are into a line about starting.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Never located in the published talks, dialogues or notebooks, which are extensively archived and searchable by the Krishnamurti Foundation.
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
No source in his works. The attribution begins to appear in the 1990s, decades after his death in 1955, always without a citation.
“Dance like nobody's watching.”
From a 1987 song lyric by Susanna Clark and Richard Leigh. It has been attributed to Rumi, Twain, Satchel Paige and William Purkey; it belongs to none of them.
“There are two wolves fighting inside you. The one you feed wins.”
No evidence of Cherokee origin, and Cherokee scholars have said so repeatedly. The earliest printing appears in a 1978 Billy Graham book, where it is credited to an 'Eskimo' source.
“The Chinese word for crisis is made of the characters for danger and opportunity.”
Wrong. The second character of 危机 means an incipient moment or a crux, not opportunity. Sinologist Victor Mair has published a detailed correction; the claim entered English through 1930s missionary writing and was popularised by John F. Kennedy.
“Namaste means: the divine in me bows to the divine in you.”
Namas-te means 'I bow to you' — a courteous greeting used in ordinary Indian speech, including to shopkeepers. The expanded devotional gloss is a Western yoga-studio addition of the late twentieth century.
“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift — that is why it is called the present.”
The pun requires English and cannot survive in Pali or in translation. The wordplay is traceable to twentieth-century American sources, notably the cartoonist Bil Keane.
“Comparison is the thief of joy.”
No printing has been found in his lifetime or in his voluminous published writing. The attribution appears only in the last two decades.
“Be here now.”
His book title and his teaching, though he credited the phrase itself to Bhagavan Das, who kept saying it to him in India. Ram Dass was consistently open about that.
“We're all just walking each other home.”
His, and characteristic: eight words, no jargon, and it requires you to believe nothing to use it.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.”
Based on a genuine quatrain, but the English is Barks's. Nicholson's and Arberry's scholarly translations of the same material read very differently.
“Everything you can imagine is real.”
No source in his recorded statements or interviews. Widely used in manifestation and vision-board material.
“The eyes are useless when the mind is blind.”
No identified ancient source in any language. 'Ancient proverb' with no culture named is, in practice, a signal that no source exists.
“Not all those who wander are lost.”
From the poem 'All that is gold does not glitter' in The Fellowship of the Ring. Included here because it is constantly assumed to be a misquote and is not.
“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”
Hers, and consistent with the surrounding material in her published talks and letters.
“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.”
Barks. Beautiful English, and not a sentence with a one-to-one Persian counterpart.
“The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.”
Not located in Goethe's works in German. Like many 'Goethe' quotations in English self-help, it appears to originate in loose translation or invention.
“We only use ten percent of our brain.”
Not a quotation from anyone, and not true. Functional imaging shows activity across the whole brain over the course of a day. The claim is often used to argue for latent psychic capacity.
“What you resist persists.”
Not in the Collected Works. The phrase is standard in twentieth-century self-help writing and was retro-fitted to Jung, presumably because it sounds like something he might have written.
Nothing matches that. Try a single word — a name, or one word from the line.
How a quote goes wrong
There are only a few mechanisms, and once you know them you can usually guess which one you are looking at before you check.
The commonest is upward attribution: an anonymous saying drifts toward the most famous plausible name. Nobody decides to do it. A line gets shared without a source, someone adds "— Buddha" because it sounds like something the Buddha would say, and within a few years that is simply what the internet believes. This is why the same sentence turns up under Lao Tzu, the Buddha and Gandhi in different decades.
The second is translation drift, and it is the most interesting one, because there is no villain. Coleman Barks's Rumi is the clearest case in English. He does not read Persian; he works from earlier scholarly translations and rewrites them as free verse, and he has always been candid that these are versions rather than translations. They are often beautiful. They are also considerably more secular than the original — Rumi's Persian is saturated with Quranic reference that the English quietly drops. When you share a Barks line as "Rumi," you are sharing a twentieth-century American poem based on a thirteenth-century Persian one.
The third is smoothing. A real passage exists, but it is long, conditional and awkward, so it gets compressed until it fits on an image. Jung's actual sentence about the unconscious appearing outside as fate is a clinical observation with a specific meaning. The version everyone shares is an instruction. That is a different claim, made by a different person, wearing his name.
Why we bother
Partly because we publish quote collections ourselves and would rather they be right. Mostly because attribution is the cheapest available test of whether a source is careful. A site that will print "Everything is energy — Einstein" without blinking is a site that will print anything, and you are about to take its advice on something that matters more than a graphic.
It also changes how you read. Once you know that "the wound is where the light enters" is Barks's English rather than Rumi's Persian, the line does not get worse — it gets more interesting. You are reading a conversation across seven centuries and two languages, not a fortune cookie.
Corrections and additions
If you can show that an entry here is wrong, we will change it and say so. That includes the direction people expect least: if you can produce a real source for something listed as unsourced — a volume, a page, a Pali or Persian original — that is the most useful message we can get. Send it here.
To suggest an addition, send the quote and where you saw it credited. We only add entries we can actually check, so "I don't think he said that" is not enough to publish, though it is a fine place to start looking.
Citing this page. It is free to quote,
screenshot or teach from, with or without asking. If you are writing something that
cites it, this works:
“Quotes People Get Wrong: an attribution check.” AfterDark Intuition. https://afterdarkintuition.com/misquoted/
Journalists and editors fact-checking an attribution on deadline are welcome to write to us — we will point you at the primary source or tell you plainly that there isn't one.
“Quotes People Get Wrong: an attribution check.” AfterDark Intuition. https://afterdarkintuition.com/misquoted/
Journalists and editors fact-checking an attribution on deadline are welcome to write to us — we will point you at the primary source or tell you plainly that there isn't one.
Related: our quote collections now carry an attribution note on each author page, including what that author is most often made to say and never did.