Owens wrote it in Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man (William Morrow and Company, New York, 1970), the book he produced with Paul G. Neimark; Quote Investigator ↗ locates the sentence on page 166, in chapter 8, “Showcase the Good.” The wording that circulates online is accurate to the letter — it simply stops early, mid-passage.
“Find the good. It's all around you. Find it, showcase it and you'll start believing in it” Jesse Owens, Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1970), p. 166. · Verbatim: “Find the good. It's all around you. Find it, showcase it and you'll start believing in it. And so will most of the people who come into contact with you.”
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In context
Evoking the world of Jesse Owens — American sprinter, four-time Olympic gold medallist & author. Theme: "Find the good. It's all around you. Find it, showcase it and you'll start believing in it". 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.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Find the good. It's all around you. Find it, showcase it and you'll start believing in it". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
Blackthink, page 166
Work
Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man
Location
Chapter 8, “Showcase the Good,” page 166
Published
William Morrow and Company, New York, 1970 (215 pp.)
Written with
Paul G. Neimark — the edition record reads “[by] Jesse Owens, with Paul G. Neimark”
Find the good. It’s all around you. Find it, showcase it and you’ll start believing in it. And so will most of the people who come into contact with you.
Showcase the good. Believe in it. It’s real, baby.
Blackthink, p. 166
The passage as transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗ from page 166. The version that circulates online stops after “believing in it” — the sentences that follow, including the chapter’s own title phrase, are almost never carried with it.
Quote Investigator ↗ traced the line to Owens’s own book, citing Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man by Jesse Owens with Paul G. Neimark (William Morrow and Company, New York, 1970), chapter 8, “Showcase the Good,” page 166, and concluding that Owens “deserves credit for this remark which he included in his 1970 book Blackthink.”
The book is exactly what that citation describes: the Open Library edition record ↗ gives Morrow, New York, 1970, 215 pages, by-statement “[by] Jesse Owens, with Paul G. Neimark” — so a page 166 exists — and a scanned copy ↗ is catalogued at the Internet Archive under both authors.
Quote Investigator also records the sentence being reprinted in 1993 with its Blackthink credit still attached — Dorothy Winbush Riley’s collection My Soul Looks Back, ‘Less I Forget prints it on page 31 over the credit line “JESSE OWENS, Blackthink, 1970” — and again in 1995, when syndicated columnist Larry Meeks ran it as a “Notable Quote” in The Modesto Bee of 19 May credited to Owens alone — see the exhibit ↗.
Worth knowing where it is not: Wikiquote’s Jesse Owens page ↗ carries a sourced quotation from Blackthink (1970) but does not list this one at all — part of why the line spread with no citation attached.
Blackthink was published in 1970, decades after the pre-1931 line that marks the US public domain, so the book remains under copyright and this sentence appears here as a short attributed extract for identification and comment. The Internet Archive copy ↗ is flagged an access-restricted item for the same reason — catalogued and searchable, not free to read.
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
Not the wrong man — the wrong half of the sentence
This is an unusual case for a famous name: the attribution is right. Jesse Owens really did write it. What goes wrong is everything around the words — the source vanishes, the passage gets cut, and the line gets read as a track-and-field motto when it comes from a book about race in America.
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SourcingBrainyQuote no citation
The line sits in BrainyQuote’s Jesse Owens list ↗ with no book, no chapter and no page beside it — the same bare presentation that usually signals a fabrication. Here the citation existed all along; it simply was not carried. Quote Investigator supplied it: Blackthink, page 166.
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WordingThe shortened version in circulation truncated
The popular quotation ends at “believing in it.” On the page it keeps going — “And so will most of the people who come into contact with you. Showcase the good. Believe in it. It’s real, baby” — per Quote Investigator’s transcription ↗. The cut drops the point Owens was building to: that showcasing the good is what persuades everyone else, not just you.
✕
FramingReaders who take it as an athlete’s training maxim
Owens’s four gold medals make the line read like locker-room advice. It is not from a sports memoir: QI places it ↗ in chapter 8 of Blackthink, a chapter titled “Showcase the Good,” in a 1970 book about Owens’s life as a Black man in America.
✕
A different maxim“Find the good and praise it” separate quote
A similar-sounding saying is not Owens’s and has its own history: Quote Investigator ↗ found its earliest exact match in an 1896 report by Madison Babcock on the public schools of San Francisco — “Find the good and praise it, speak sparingly of the bad” — and tentatively credits him. Two different lines; don’t merge them.
✓The line is genuinely Owens’s own writing: page 166 of Blackthink (1970), in a chapter he called “Showcase the Good” — Quote Investigator’s citation ↗.
Context
Why he was writing it
Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man, written with Paul G. Neimark and published by William Morrow in 1970, was Owens’s argument against what he saw as the destructive turn in Black politics at the end of the 1960s. The chapter this sentence comes from — “Showcase the Good” — is where he sets out the alternative he believed in.
The advice is practical rather than sentimental. Owens is not claiming the good is easy to see; he is claiming that belief follows attention, and that other people’s belief follows yours. That is exactly what the truncated version loses, because the rest of the passage is about the effect on everyone else in the room.
The book was not his last word. In 1972 Owens published I Have Changed, in which, as Wikipedia notes ↗, he revised the positions on Black activism he had taken earlier. This sentence outlived that revision in public memory — as did one other line from the same book, the “battles that count” passage Wikiquote carries ↗.
Find it, showcase it and you’ll start believing in it.
How the line travelled
Quote Investigator’s exhibit shows the quotation moving with its citation intact for a while. It appears in Dorothy Winbush Riley’s 1993 anthology My Soul Looks Back, ‘Less I Forget: A Collection of Quotations by People of Color on page 31, credited to Jesse Owens, Blackthink, 1970.
In 1995 the syndicated columnist Larry Meeks ran it as a “Notable Quote” in The Modesto Bee of 19 May and credited Owens. Somewhere between those reprints and the modern quote-aggregator listings the book title fell away — which is how a properly sourced sentence ends up looking like an internet-manufactured one.
QI credits the reader inquiry that prompted the investigation to Schuyler W. Huck.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1913–1980 · American sprinter, four-time Olympic gold medallist & author
James Cleveland “Jesse” Owens was born in Oakville, Alabama in 1913 and won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics — 100 metres, 200 metres, long jump and 4×100-metre relay. The medals did not translate into a career: he worked for decades as a public-relations businessman, sports promoter and speaker, and served as a US goodwill ambassador from 1955. He was also a writer, publishing Blackthink in 1970 and I Have Changed in 1972 with the collaborator Paul G. Neimark; he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976 and died in Tucson, Arizona in 1980.
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Jesse Owens, with Paul G. Neimark, Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1970), 166. Citation located by Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Find the Good. It’s All Around You. Find It, Showcase It, and You’ll Start Believing in It,” 1 March 2021.
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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Find the good. It's all around you. Find it, showcase it and you'll start believing in it’?” Last verified 25 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/find-the-good-its-all-around-you-find-it-showcase-it-and/