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Q1112Not found in Aristotle's works in this form. It is likely a modern reshaping of a genuine line from the Nicomachean Ethics (Book I): it is the mark of an educated mind to expect only as much precision as each subject allows. The internet version swapped precision for open-mindedness — a good thought in its own right, but a 20th-century one wearing an ancient name.
Q1113From Plato's Republic (Book II, 377a), in the discussion of how to educate the city's guardians: the beginning of any work is the most important part, “especially for anything young and tender”, because that is when character takes its stamp. Plato meant childhood education; the sentence has since consoled and warned everyone starting anything.
Q1114A proverb rather than a quotation: the English wording dates from the 16th–17th centuries. It is loosely inspired by Plato's Republic (Book II), where Socrates says a city arises because none of us is self-sufficient — “our need will be the real creator.” The observation survives every technology shift: scarcity and problems, not comfort, are what force new ideas into existence.
Q1115Not found in Plato's dialogues; quote researchers class it as a modern saying that borrowed his name for authority. Plato did dramatise the contrast — his Socrates repeatedly deflates men who talk to display rather than to discover. The maxim's test is still useful: before speaking, ask which of the two you are about to do.
Q1117The traditional summary of Socrates' stance, distilled from Plato's Apology; Socrates never wrote anything, and the exact sentence appears in no ancient text. What the Apology does record is his discovery that his only wisdom lay in not thinking he knew what he did not know. The paradox is generative, not defeatist: real inquiry only begins where certainty ends.
Q1118Reported by Diogenes Laertius in Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (3rd century AD), a biographical collection written six centuries after Socrates — so it is tradition rather than transcript. It compresses the Socratic conviction that wrongdoing flows from ignorance: no one errs knowingly, so the deepest cure for evil is understanding.
Q1119Widely attributed to Confucius, but not found in the Analects; the wording is modern. The Analects does teach the substance, though — Confucius praised steady effort and warned against those who quit halfway: “It is like building a mound; if I stop one basketful short, it is I who stopped.” Persistence, not pace, is the Confucian virtue here.
Q1120Authentic in substance: in the Analects (2.17) Confucius tells a disciple, “When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it — this is knowledge.” The modern wording tightens the original. It remains the best one-line defence against the most expensive of errors: confident ignorance.
Q1121Widely attributed to Confucius, but not found in the Analects; it is closer to the old Chinese parable of the “foolish old man who moved the mountains”, told by the Taoist philosopher Liezi. Whatever its route into English, the engineering is sound: scale defeats imagination but not arithmetic — mountains do move, one stone at a time.
Q1122Authentic Seneca: from Letter 13 of his Letters to Lucilius (c. AD 64), written in his final years. The full passage runs: “There are more things likely to frighten us than to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” His advice in the same letter is startlingly modern — do not be unhappy before the crisis, since the feared event may never arrive.
Q1123This comes from Seneca's On the Shortness of Life. The Stoic context matters: he is less worried that life is brief than that attention is wasted. Seneca (c. 4 BC–65 AD) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman and writer, whose letters on living wisely are still widely read.
Q1124Authentic Seneca: from Letter 77 of the Letters to Lucilius, written as consolation about death. “As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.” A play, he says elsewhere, is judged by its performance, not its length. Seneca was forced by Nero to take his own life within a year of writing it — the letter reads differently once you know.
Q1125This comes from Epictetus's Enchiridion, a compact Stoic handbook. Its practical frame is control: separate what is yours to choose from what is only yours to meet. Epictetus (c. 50–135 AD) was a Stoic philosopher born into slavery, who taught that we cannot control events, only our response to them.
Q1126A modern paraphrase of the most famous sentence in Epictetus's Enchiridion (5): “People are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of them.” Born a slave, later Rome's most influential Stoic teacher, Epictetus built everything on one division: events are not up to us; judgements are. Modern cognitive-behavioural therapy openly credits him as an ancestor.
Q1127Preserved among the fragments attributed to Epictetus by later ancient authors, so the wording is traditional rather than certain. The thought is bedrock Stoicism: a person commanded by their own appetites and fears has merely changed masters. Freedom, for Epictetus — who had been literally enslaved — begins with self-command, not circumstances.
Q1128The river doctrine of Heraclitus (c. 535–475 BC), reported by Plato in the Cratylus (402a): everything gives way and nothing stays, and “you could not step twice into the same river.” Heraclitus's own surviving fragment is subtler — other and other waters flow onto those who step in. Either way the physics is honest: the river is real, and so is its refusal to be the same twice.
Q1130A modern paraphrase of the opening verses of the Dhammapada, the best-loved anthology of the Buddha's teaching: all experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind. Speak or act with a corrupted mind, trouble follows; with a clear one, ease follows “like a never-departing shadow.” The paraphrase is looser than the scripture — but faithful to its claim.
Q1131Widely attributed to the Buddha, but found in no Buddhist scripture; quote researchers class it as a 20th-century creation. Buddhist canon does contain a related genuine saying — that three things cannot remain hidden for long: the moon, the sun, and the truth proclaimed by a Tathagata. The internet version simplified the cast and kept the optimism.
Q1132Widely attributed to the Buddha, but absent from the early scriptures; the phrasing is modern. The direction of the thought is authentically Buddhist all the same: the tradition consistently locates both suffering and its end in the mind's own workings, not in rearranging the world. Peace, on this view, is grown, not found.
Q1133Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and consistent with sentiments in his notebooks (he wrote that “iron rusts from disuse… even so does inaction sap the vigour of the mind”), though this English sentence is not a direct notebook translation. Leonardo filled over 7,000 surviving pages with questions — anatomy, water, optics, flight — and treated curiosity as inexhaustible fuel rather than a phase of youth.
Q1134Not found in Leonardo's notebooks: the attribution is modern, popularised in the 20th century (it appeared in advertising and was famously adopted in early Apple marketing). Leonardo's authentic work does argue the idea, though — his studies pare complex machines and bodies down to clean principles. Simplicity as the far side of mastery, not the near side of laziness.
Q1135Not Leonardo's: the sentence is a modern adaptation of the French poet Paul Valéry's remark that a poem is never finished, only abandoned (1933). It attached itself to Leonardo because his life seemed to prove it — he left the Adoration of the Magi unfinished, reworked the Mona Lisa for years and carried it with him until death. Wrong name, right patron saint.
Q1136Widely attributed to Michelangelo, but no source in his letters or poems — or in early biographies — has ever been produced; it likely acquired his name in the 20th century. The warning itself is a fine one: missed high aims still stretch us, while achieved low ones quietly set the ceiling. Michelangelo's actual habit — accepting the Sistine ceiling with no fresco experience — makes him a fair mascot.
Q1137A beloved legend rather than a documented quotation: no version appears in Michelangelo's writings, and the story grew through 19th-century retellings. His authentic poems do contain the germ — he wrote that the greatest artist has no concept the marble does not already contain within itself. The sculptor's task, in both versions, is not adding but revealing.
