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Q1145Genuinely Voltaire: he quoted the Italian proverb 'il meglio è l'inimico del bene' in his Dictionnaire philosophique and opened his 1772 poem 'La Bégueule' with its French form — 'le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.' The insight has since been adopted by engineers and economists alike: chasing a flawless version often destroys a good one that would have worked, shipped and helped.
Q1148Widely attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but absent from his writings — including Poor Richard's Almanack, where hunters have looked hardest. It reads like a Franklin maxim because he manufactured so many of the genuine kind ('Lost time is never found again'). The logic holds regardless: preparation is cheap insurance, and its absence is a plan too — just a bad one.
Q1149These are actually the words of the historian Will Durant, from the Kant chapter of his bestseller The Story of Philosophy (1926); over time the summary was mistaken for the philosopher. ('Science is organised knowledge' alone goes back to Herbert Spencer.) The pairing earns its fame: knowledge can be stacked in libraries, but wisdom only shows up as a well-run life.
Q1150Verbatim Kant: this is the categorical imperative, the centrepiece of his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). The test it proposes is universalisation — before acting, ask whether you could will everyone in your situation to act the same way. Lying fails the test (universal lying destroys the trust lying depends on). It remains the most influential single sentence in modern moral philosophy.
Q1151This comes from Darwin's On the Origin of Species. The source context is not self-help but natural selection: survival depends on variation, pressure, and changing conditions. Charles Darwin (1809–1882) was an English naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection transformed our understanding of life.
Q1152From a letter the young Darwin wrote to his sister Susan in 1836, near the end of the Beagle voyage, later published in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887). He was quoting a rule he lived by ever after: despite chronic illness that limited him to a few working hours a day, those hours — kept sacred for decades — produced On the Origin of Species.
Q1153Attributed to Nikola Tesla; versions appear in profiles and reminiscences of his later years, when his rivals were rich and he was not. The consolation is the long game: Tesla's alternating-current system does power the modern world, and his name now marks cars, units and craters. Vindication arrived — decades past the deadline.
Q1154Widely attributed to Tesla, but no lecture, article or interview containing it has ever been produced; it belongs to the modern Tesla mythos, where his real genius attracts mystical add-ons. His authentic work needs no embroidery: energy and frequency were precisely what he mastered — the rotating magnetic field, radio-frequency experiments, alternating current itself.
Q1155This comes from The Brothers Karamazov, where Dostoevsky turns faith, guilt, freedom, and responsibility into a family drama with philosophical force. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist whose works probe morality, faith and the depths of the human mind.
Q1156Widely attributed to Dostoevsky and true to his fiction, though not traced to a specific novel in this exact wording; his The House of the Dead — drawn from his own Siberian imprisonment — circles the same truth. Dostoevsky watched men survive on hope and collapse without it: hope, for him, was not optimism but the oxygen of the soul.
Q1157This comes from Twilight of the Idols, one of Nietzsche's late, sharp works. The source matters because the style is aphoristic: short lines are meant to provoke, not soothe. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher known for ideas like the will to power, written in a vivid, aphoristic style.
Q1158This comes from Twilight of the Idols, one of Nietzsche's late, sharp works. The source matters because the style is aphoristic: short lines are meant to provoke, not soothe. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher known for ideas like the will to power, written in a vivid, aphoristic style.
Q1159This comes from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche's poetic-philosophical work. The source speaks through image and prophecy, so the line should be read as dramatic thought, not plain advice. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher known for ideas like the will to power, written in a vivid, aphoristic style.
Q1161Authentic Dickinson — the complete two-line poem reads: 'That it will never come again / Is what makes life so sweet.' Like almost all of her nearly 1,800 poems, it was found in manuscript and published only after her death in 1886. Two lines carry a whole philosophy: scarcity is not the enemy of sweetness but its source.
Q1163This comes from Wilde's essay The Soul of Man under Socialism. The source context is art, individual freedom, and suspicion of social systems that flatten the person. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish poet and playwright famed for his wit, author of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'.
Q1164A polished popular condensation of the conclusion of Walden (1854), where Thoreau actually wrote: 'If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.' The shortened form appears on posters; the original adds the important part — the success that comes is of an unexpected kind.
Q1166Widely attributed to Goethe, but not found in his German works in this form; scholars suspect it entered English through loose translation of lines in Wilhelm Meister. Goethe lived the principle regardless — poet, novelist, minister of state, amateur scientist — a man constitutionally incapable of leaving knowledge unapplied.
Q1167Widely attributed to Goethe, though untraced in his works; the sentiment echoes lines in Faust, where standing still is the one wager Faust must never win. Biology quietly agrees: systems that stop adapting do not stay where they are — the surroundings move, and stillness becomes drift backwards.
Q1169Widely attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but researchers have never located it in his essays, journals or lectures. It compresses his self-reliance doctrine into modern coaching language — Emerson's real versions are wilder ('Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string'). The idea survives translation: destiny, in his view, is a decision repeated daily.
Q1171Widely attributed to Einstein, but not found in his writings, letters or recorded talks — he is among the most misquoted people in history. The engineering culture it describes is real, though: error is the tuition fee of novelty. Einstein's genuine failures (his blunders about the cosmological constant, his rejected unified theories) proved the point better than the slogan does.
Q1172Authentic Einstein, with a traceable source: the editor William Miller reported it from a conversation in LIFE magazine (2 May 1955), weeks after Einstein's death — 'Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.' The distinction is precise: success measures what you extract from the world; value measures what you add to it.
Q1173Attributed to Marie Curie; the fuller version — 'Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less' — circulates without a verified letter or lecture source. It matches her practice exactly: she kept working with radioactive material she did not yet know was killing her, convinced that understanding was the only road through fear.
Q1174Reported as Marie Curie's advice — Eve Curie's 1937 biography of her mother and later collections carry versions of it — though no primary document fixes the wording. It describes her temperament faithfully: she refused celebrity, skipped gossip and measured her days in grams of radium and hours at the bench. Ideas, unlike reputations, repaid her attention.
Q1175Popularised by Nelson Mandela and true to his story, though the sentence predates him — proverb collections carry versions from long before, and no Mandela speech containing it has been located. His life remains its best proof: the dismantling of apartheid and a negotiated democracy looked flatly impossible for decades, right up until they were done.
