The Torment of Saint Anthony Sold as workshop, cleaned, and re-read as the earliest Michelangelo
Finds
- All true stories end in death Hemingway wrote a longer, better sentence
- It ain’t bragging if you can do it Dizzy Dean said something slower and better
- I find ecstasy in living Emily Dickinson said it out loud; a 1940 anthology turned it into a letter
- The shoeshine boy and the stock market Wall Street's favourite exit signal, traced to a book from 1959
- “When People Show You Who They Are, Believe Them” Traced to a Wellesley commencement stage in May 1997
- When the bird and the book disagree A birdwatcher's proverb that Audubon never said
- Don't just do something. Sit there. Widely credited to Thich Nhat Hanh; first found in 1954, as orders written for men stationed alone on radar platforms at sea.
- No individual raindrop ever considers itself responsible for the flood Credited to Ruskin and to Douglas Adams; actually Sydney J. Harris
- Samuel Johnson on Concentration The most quoted line about focus was cover for a forgery
- The People Have Spoken — The Bastards The best concession speech in American politics, possibly never conceded
- Kenneth Boulding on how things got that way A one-line theory of everything
- Moritz Goldschmidt on seeing the world The oldest source for a much-misattributed line
- Philipp von Jolly: "In physics, almost everything is already discovered" Quote Investigator traces the famous 'physics is finished' line — usually attributed to Lord Kelvin — to a paraphrase of Philipp von Jolly's advice to a young Max Planck.
- Victor Borge: "Laughter is the shortest distance between two people" Quote Investigator traces the famous Borge line to a 1972 appearance — the canonical attribution holds up, surprisingly.
- "Do Not Confine Your Children to Your Own Learning" Quote Investigator traces a parenting line often misattributed to Tagore
- "Nobody Notices When Things Go Right" Quote Investigator traces Zimmerman's Law of Complaints to 1978
- Boulay de la Meurthe — "Worse than a crime; it was a blunder" Not Talleyrand, not Fouché, not Napoleon
- Stendhal — "God's only excuse is that he doesn't exist" Quote Investigator nails the 175-year provenance
- Wayne Dyer — "Change the way you look at things" Not Max Planck, despite what the internet insists