The passage is not Carnegie’s. It first appears unsigned on 1 June 1895 in the Mining and Scientific Press of San Francisco, under the heading “Keeping Everlastingly At It Brings Success,” and Quote Investigator ↗ reports that its author remains unidentified. Carnegie’s name drifted onto it only because the piece was reprinted in the posthumous Dale Carnegie’s Scrapbook (1959) — where it is credited not to Carnegie but to Elbert Hubbard.
“Genius is really only the power of making continuous efforts” Anonymous, "Keeping Everlastingly At It Brings Success," Mining and Scientific Press, vol. 70, no. 22, 1 June 1895, p. 344. Not Dale Carnegie: the 1959 Dale Carnegie's Scrapbook, edited posthumously by Dorothy Carnegie, credited the passage to Elbert Hubbard, and Quote Investigator reports the real author is still unidentified. https://quotle.info/who-said/genius-is-really-only-the-power-of-making-continuous-efforts/
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Dale Carnegie. Use the credit shown above instead.
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In context
Evoking the themes of work, resilience and success. Theme: "Genius is really only the power of making continuous efforts". 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 1895 item
Work
Keeping Everlastingly At It Brings Success
First printed
Mining and Scientific Press, vol. 70, no. 22, p. 344, col. 3 — San Francisco, 1 June 1895
Author
Anonymous — unidentified
Closing lines lifted from
Robert Burns Wilson, “And So—I Gave Up Trying!”, The Critic, 8 October 1887, p. 173
Genius is really only the power of making continuous efforts. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it—so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it. How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience would have achieved success. As the tide goes clear out, so it comes clear in. In business, sometimes prospects may seem darkest when really they are on the turn. A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success. There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.
Unsigned
As transcribed by Quote Investigator from the 1 June 1895 printing. The wording drifted immediately: the 1896 reprint in Baldwin’s The Search for the North Pole reads “Genius is often only…” and the 1911 Roycroft printing reads “Genius is only…”
How an unsigned filler became four people’s quotation
1 June 1895 — the earliest printing on record.Quote Investigator ↗ traces the passage to an unsigned item headed “Keeping Everlastingly At It Brings Success” in the Mining and Scientific Press, vol. 70, no. 22, p. 344, and concludes the author remains anonymous. It also documents reprints within weeks in the Pacific Rural Press, the Illustrated Electrical Review (12 June) and The New York Times (16 June).
1896 — still nobody’s. Evelyn Briggs Baldwin reprints the paragraph on p. 520 of The Search for the North Pole ↗, headed “KEEPING EVERLASTINGLY AT IT” and credited to nothing but a magazine: “[Electrical Review.]” No person’s name is attached anywhere on the page.
1911 — the passage acquires an author. Alice Hubbard drops it, still uncredited, into the Elbert Hubbard chapter of An American Bible ↗ (The Roycrofters), on p. 304; the chapter opens at p. 281 in the book’s own contents. Quote Investigator dates the Hubbard attribution to this book and calls the supporting evidence not substantive.
1959 — how Carnegie’s name got near it. The posthumous Dale Carnegie’s Scrapbook, edited by Dorothy Carnegie, prints the essay in its chapter on Work — and, per Quote Investigator’s citation ↗, credits it to Elbert Hubbard, not to Carnegie.
✓Public domain
The item was first printed on 1 June 1895 and reprinted, still unsigned, in 1896 and 1911 — all well before the 1931 US copyright cutoff, so the text is in the public domain. Anonymity does not change that: the status turns on the date of publication, which is documented here down to volume, number and page.
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
Five names, none of them the author
In more than a century of circulation this paragraph has been signed by four different people and half-signed by a fifth. Not one of them is documented as having written it.
✕
The whole passageDale Carnegie Unsupported
Carnegie’s name rides on the passage because it appears in Dale Carnegie’s Scrapbook: A Treasury of the Wisdom of the Ages — an anthology of other people’s sayings, published in 1959 and edited by his widow Dorothy Carnegie after his death in 1955. Quote Investigator’s citation ↗ records that the Scrapbook printed the essay in its chapter on Work and credited it to Elbert Hubbard. Carnegie’s own book, in other words, says it isn’t his — and Wikiquote’s Carnegie page ↗ does not list it either.
✕
The whole passageElbert Hubbard The dominant credit
In 1911 Alice Hubbard reprinted the anonymous 1895 item inside the Elbert Hubbard chapter of An American Bible ↗ (The Roycrofters) with no source line, on p. 304 — the chapter opens at p. 281 in the book’s own contents. Quote Investigator dates the Hubbard attribution to that book and says the supporting evidence “was not substantive.” The credit was then repeated by Herbert V. Prochnow’s New Speaker’s Treasury of Wit and Wisdom (1958) and by the 1959 Carnegie Scrapbook, and it is what most quote sites print today.
✕
The closing sentences onlyRobert Burns Wilson Partly true
Wilson’s essay “And So—I Gave Up Trying!” in The Critic of 8 October 1887 contains “There is no defeat except from within” and “There is no failure except in no longer trying,” and Quote Investigator ↗ finds the anonymous 1895 writer lifted those lines from him. The opening sentence about genius is not Wilson’s, so crediting him with the famous line overshoots what the record shows.
✕
The closing sentencesKin Hubbard A name mix-up
The Instant Quotation Dictionary of 1974 gave the lines to Kin Hubbard, describing him as a popular cartoonist, per Quote Investigator’s citation list ↗. Kin Hubbard and Elbert Hubbard were unrelated; the slip between two Hubbards is the obvious reading, and the credit still turns up online.
✕
A portion of the passageAmelia J. Calver Wikiquote’s note
Wikiquote ↗ records that part of the passage was once given to Amelia J. Calver in The Manifesto of January 1896, p. 184, published by the Shakers — which, if right, means a name was being pinned on it within months of its first appearance.
✓The paragraph first appears unsigned as a short item headed “Keeping Everlastingly At It Brings Success” in the Mining and Scientific Press of 1 June 1895, and Quote Investigator ↗ concludes its author remains anonymous.
Context
Why this one keeps changing hands
A century ago, American trade weeklies filled the bottom of a column with short uplift — unsigned, uncredited, and endlessly reprinted. This paragraph is one of those. Quote Investigator ↗ finds it in the Mining and Scientific Press on 1 June 1895 and then in the Pacific Rural Press the same day, the Illustrated Electrical Review on 12 June, The New York Times on 16 June, and a photography journal by September — a mining journal, a farm paper, an electrical trade weekly and a newspaper, all inside four months, none of them naming a writer.
Anonymous text with no owner is exactly what famous names get attached to. Alice Hubbard reprinted the paragraph inside the Elbert Hubbard chapter of An American Bible ↗ in 1911 with no source line, and Hubbard has carried it ever since. Dale Carnegie’s name arrived by a further step of drift: a book with his name on the cover reprinted the piece — while crediting Hubbard — and readers took the cover for the author.
An unsigned column-filler that has outlived every name pinned to it.
The three documented wordings
“Genius is really only…” — the reading Quote Investigator transcribes from the earliest printing it found, the Mining and Scientific Press of 1 June 1895, p. 344. This is the form that circulates today.
“Genius is often only…” — the reading on p. 520 of Evelyn Briggs Baldwin’s The Search for the North Pole ↗ (1896), where it is headed “KEEPING EVERLASTINGLY AT IT” and credited to nothing but a magazine: “[Electrical Review.]” Wikiquote reproduces this same “often” form.
“Genius is only…” — the reading printed on p. 304 of An American Bible ↗ (1911), the Roycroft volume that first placed the passage under Elbert Hubbard’s name. Quote Investigator also records it in The Fra, Hubbard’s own magazine, in July 1913.
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The author
Anonymous, and likely to stay that way
AN
Anonymous
Unidentified writer · Mining and Scientific Press, San Francisco · 1 June 1895
Nobody knows who wrote this. It surfaced as an unsigned filler paragraph in the American trade press of 1895 — the kind of column-end inspirational item editors clipped from one another without credit — and Quote Investigator, which went looking, reports the author is still unidentified. The one named writer anywhere in its ancestry is the American painter and poet Robert Burns Wilson, whose 1887 essay supplied the closing sentences but not the famous opening line about genius.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
“Keeping Everlastingly At It Brings Success.” Mining and Scientific Press 70, no. 22 (June 1, 1895): 344. Unsigned. Reprinted, credited only to Electrical Review, in Evelyn Briggs Baldwin, The Search for the North Pole; or, Life in the Great White World (1896), 520; and, uncredited, in An American Bible, ed. Alice Hubbard (East Aurora, NY: The Roycrofters, 1911), 304.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Genius is really only the power of making continuous efforts’?” Last verified 30 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/genius-is-really-only-the-power-of-making-continuous-efforts/