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Who really said it

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music

Not Rumi — and not Nietzsche either Unknown Origin anonymous · oldest documented version 1813 · in print as a proverb by 1927
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

There is no Rumi source. The line is not among Rumi’s sourced quotations, and the closest thing to it in Quote Investigator’s chronology is a different sentence from the 2004 expanded edition of Coleman Barks’s The Essential Rumi. The sentence is far more often pinned on Nietzsche, and that credit fails too: Quote Investigator found no substantive evidence he used the expression and concluded that “based on current evidence the statement origin seems to be anonymous.” The oldest documented version of the image is Germaine de Staël’s, written in 1813 — and by 1927 The Times of London was already calling the saying an old proverb.

Last verified 4 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music” Not Rumi, and not Nietzsche. Quote Investigator found no substantive evidence for Nietzsche and concluded the origin seems to be anonymous; Wikiquote lists it under Nietzsche's Misattributed section, and it is absent from Rumi's sourced quotations. The oldest documented version is Germaine de Staël's Germany (London: J. Murray, 1813), and The Times of London was calling the saying an old proverb by 1927. Via Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Rumi. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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In context

Evoking the themes of creativity, freedom and purpose. Theme: "And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

The source

Popular credit
Rumi — and, far more often, Friedrich Nietzsche
Oldest documented form
Germany (De l’Allemagne)
Published
Germaine de Staël · 1813 — the J. Murray, London English edition per the archive.org scan below; Wikiquote cites only the year
In Rumi?
Not present among Wikiquote’s sourced Rumi quotations

. . . sometimes even in the habitual course of life, the reality of this world disappears all at once, and we feel ourselves in the middle of its interests as we should at a ball, where we did not hear the music; the dancing that we saw there would appear insane. Earliest documented version · 1813

This is the oldest documented version of the thought — and it is neither Rumi nor the modern wording. Germaine de Staël is describing a moment when ordinary life abruptly looks purposeless, not coining an aphorism about nonconformity. Wikiquote quotes this passage as the “first recorded appearance” of the saying.

Quote Investigator: Those Who Dance Are Considered Insane by Those Who Can’t Hear the Music

How we traced it

  • The line is not Rumi’s, and it is not Nietzsche’s either. Quote Investigator tracked the saying across nearly two centuries of print and ended where honest research usually ends on a line like this: “Based on current evidence the statement origin seems to be anonymous” the full chronology ↗.
  • The oldest documented version is not Persian but French. In 1813 Germaine de Staël published De l’Allemagne, known in English as Germany, and Wikiquote quotes the ball-without-music passage from it as the first recorded appearance — filed, notably, under Misattributed on its Nietzsche page Wikiquote ↗.
  • By 1927 the saying was already being described as old. The Times of London printed “They who dance are thought mad by those who hear not the music” and called it an old proverb; a 1936 Boston Globe column filed a near-identical wording under “Modern Proverbs” the citations ↗.
  • The polished modern sentence arrives late. In Quote Investigator’s chronology it appears in 2005, in a Florida newspaper’s “They Said It” column, already ascribed to Nietzsche — eight years after George Carlin printed a shorter form in Brain Droppings, and four years after he reprinted it credited simply “– Anon.” QI ↗.

The viral wording has no identified source, so no copyright status can honestly be asserted for it — it is not demonstrably anyone’s published text. The 1813 de Staël passage excerpted above is long out of copyright, but that passage is a precursor, not this sentence.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Who it gets pinned on

This line is a magnet. The same thought circulates under at least four different names, and not one of them survives contact with the record.

Rumi no source

The sentence is not among Wikiquote’s sourced Rumi quotations ↗, and Quote Investigator’s chronology contains no Rumi instance of it at all — only a thematically related passage from the 2004 expanded edition of Coleman Barks’s The Essential Rumi: “We rarely hear the inward music, but we’re all dancing to it nevertheless” QI ↗. Different sentence, different claim — and Barks’s books are re-renderings rather than translations from the Persian.

Friedrich Nietzsche misattributed

Wikiquote lists “Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music” in the Misattributed section of its Nietzsche page Wikiquote ↗, and Quote Investigator states flatly that it “has not yet located any substantive evidence that Nietzsche used this expression” QI ↗.

‘Angela Monet’ phantom

A variant — “Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music” — travels under the name Angela Monet. Quote Investigator reports a Colorado newspaper crediting her in 2002, and that Poetry Society staff had never heard of her: “Monet doesn’t appear to exist” QI ↗.

George Carlin disclaimed

Carlin printed “Those who dance are considered insane by those who can’t hear the music” in Brain Droppings (1997); when the line reappeared in Napalm & Silly Putty (2001) it carried the credit “– Anon.” — he did not claim it QI ↗.

The honest answer is the unglamorous one: nobody knows who said it first. Quote Investigator’s verdict is that “based on current evidence the statement origin seems to be anonymous” — a saying already being called an old proverb in 1927, long before either Rumi’s or Nietzsche’s name was attached to it Quote Investigator ↗.

Context

Why this one spreads

The sentence is built for sharing: it flatters the reader, quietly condemns everyone else, and needs no context whatsoever. That is also why it has no author. Lines like this accrete over generations of retelling, and the famous names attach afterwards — whichever name makes the sentiment feel authorised.

The paper trail runs backwards through comedy, newspapers and proverb collections to a French novelist. In 1813 Germaine de Staël described the feeling of watching a ball without hearing the music; by 1927 The Times of London was printing a compact proverb version and calling it old; by the late 1990s George Carlin had it as an anonymous one-liner; and only in the mid-2000s did the polished modern wording begin arriving with Nietzsche’s name on it — and, on social media, Rumi’s.

It was already an “old proverb” in 1927 — long before anyone thought to put Nietzsche’s or Rumi’s name on it.

Two footnotes on the trail

A proverb reference work quoted by Quote Investigator, the Thesaurus of Traditional English Metaphor (2002), records “they who dance are thought mad by those who hear not the music” tagged with the date 1575. No sixteenth-century text appears anywhere in QI’s own chronology, whose earliest located citation is 1813 — so read the 1575 tag as a compiler’s estimate of the proverb’s age, not as a found source QI ↗.

The wording got a burst of attention in 2010, when Megan Fox had a version tattooed and the British press covered it — crediting not Nietzsche but a poet called Angela Monet, whom, as The Guardian reported, nobody at the Poetry Society had ever heard of. The Nietzsche credit rides alongside in the same years, but it arrives by its own route — a 2003 Usenet post, a 2005 Florida newspaper, a 2012 BBC quiz QI ↗.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Creativity Freedom Purpose

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Origin: Those Who Dance Are Considered Insane by Those Who Can’t Hear the Musicquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: a dated chronology from 1813 to 2012, the Angela Monet and George Carlin threads, and the conclusion that the origin appears anonymous.
Friedrich Nietzsche — Misattributeden.wikiquote.org

Lists the saying under Misattributed, quotes the de Staël 1813 passage as its first recorded appearance, and notes the 1927 “old proverb” reference.
Rumi — sourced quotationsen.wikiquote.org

Rumi’s quotations, with sections drawn from the Masnavi and the Divan-i Shams. This line does not appear anywhere on the page.
Germany, by Madame de Staël (1813)archive.org

Scan of volume 3 of Germany, by Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël, published by J. Murray, London, 1813 — the work behind the earliest documented version.
Corrections of Popular Versions of Poems From Rumi’s Divandar-al-masnavi.org

Scholarly corrections comparing popular English “versions” of Rumi against the Persian, including verses it identifies as not authentic Rumi at all.
Rumi for the New-Age Soul: Coleman Barks and the Problems of Popular Translationsajammc.com

How Barks’s re-renderings — the main channel by which “Rumi” reaches English readers — reshape the original, and how unverified Rumi quotes spread from there.

The name it gets pinned to

Why it lands on Rumi

Rumi

1207–1273 · Persian poet and Sufi mystic · the order formed around him gave the world the whirling dervishes

Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi was a thirteenth-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic who settled in Konya, and the Mevlevi order that grew around him became known worldwide for the whirling sama ceremony. That association is exactly why an aphorism about dancing to music other people cannot hear drifts towards his name. His actual corpus is enormous and specific — the six-book Masnavi and the Divan-i Shams, tens of thousands of lines — and this sentence is in neither. Much of the English “Rumi” circulating online comes from modern re-renderings by writers who do not read Persian, which is how loose material ends up under his name in the first place.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

How to cite this page

No source located. Earliest documented version: Germaine de Staël, Germany [De l’Allemagne] (1813), quoted in Wikiquote, “Friedrich Nietzsche: Misattributed.” Origin of the modern wording anonymous; see Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Those Who Dance Are Considered Insane by Those Who Can’t Hear the Music,” 5 June 2012.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/and-those-who-were-seen-dancing-were-thought-to-be-insane/

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