These three lines were found written on the wall of a cellar in Cologne and were circulating in print by the late 1950s, with no connection to Anne Frank in any source we could find. The Key West Citizen of 2 January 1959 ↗ prints all three sentences and says plainly where they came from; by 1963 the Phoenix Jewish News ↗ was printing them again with a different account of who did the writing.
“I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when feeling it not. I believe in God even when He is silent” Anonymous inscription found on a cellar wall in Cologne; earliest printing located: The Key West Citizen, 2 January 1959. Not Anne Frank. Source: Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Anne Frank. 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.
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the themes of hope, resilience and doubt. Theme: "I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when feeling it not. I believe in God even when He is silent". 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 "I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when feeling it not. I believe in God even when He is silent". 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
The cellar wall in Cologne
Form
Anonymous inscription on a cellar wall, Cologne
Earliest printing we located
The Key West Citizen, 2 January 1959, image 5
Also printed
The Phoenix Jewish News, 3 May 1963, image 8
Author
Unknown — and unknown in 1959 too
“On the wall of a cellar in Cologne, where a number of escaped prisoners of war hid for the duration, there was found this inscription: ‘I believe in the sun, even when it is not shining. I believe in love, even when feeling it not. I believe in God, even when he is silent.’”
From a religion column on image 5 of The Key West Citizen, 2 January 1959 — the earliest printing we were able to locate. Note the wording: “even when feeling it not”, the slightly archaic phrase that survives in the version shared today.
We searched the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America archive for the exact phrase and found it in the Key West Citizen of 2 January 1959 ↗, which prints all three sentences and reports the inscription as having been found on a cellar wall in Cologne where escaped prisoners of war had hidden.
Four years later the Phoenix Jewish News of 3 May 1963 ↗ prints the same three lines and dates the inscription to “20 years ago in a cellar in Cologne, where Jews hid from the Nazis” — the same text, a different account of who wrote it. The origin story was already unstable while the war was still in living memory.
Anne Frank’s English Wikiquote page ↗ does not carry these lines in any section, and a search of Wikiquote as a whole returns no page containing the sentence.
The lines are long established in Holocaust remembrance liturgy: Wikipedia’s article on Yom HaShoah ↗ lists “I believe in the sun even when it is not shining…” among the modern poems read at the observance, with no author attached.
No rights badge, deliberately. The inscription is anonymous, its date of composition is unknown, and the person who wrote it on that wall was never identified — so there is no work, no author and no publication date to reason from. The 1959 and 1963 newspaper pages we quote are held in the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America collection.
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
Often misattributed
This inscription has been credited to at least three different sets of people, and the credit tends to shift toward whoever the reader will find most affecting. The text itself has stayed remarkably stable; only the story around it moves.
✕
Most common todayAnne Frank Refuted
Absent from her Wikiquote page ↗ and from her published writing, and absent from both newspaper printings we located, which name no author at all.
~
In print, 1959Escaped prisoners of war hiding in a Cologne cellar Earliest located
How the Key West Citizen ↗ described it on 2 January 1959 — the earliest account we found.
~
In print, 1963Jews hiding from the Nazis in a Cologne cellar Context
The version given by the Phoenix Jewish News ↗ on 3 May 1963, which dates the writing to about 1943. This is the account that became standard.
✓The honest answer is that nobody knows who wrote it. Two printings four years apart give two different accounts of the hiders, and the earlier of the two ↗ names no author — which is the strongest evidence that none was known even then.
Context
Why it mattered
What makes these lines remarkable is not who wrote them but that they were written at all — scratched onto a wall by someone hiding, for no reader they would ever meet. The three clauses escalate deliberately: the sun you cannot see, the love you cannot feel, the God who does not answer.
That structure is why the text outlived its author. It entered Holocaust remembrance liturgy as an anonymous poem and has stayed there, and the later habit of signing it “Anne Frank” arguably takes something away from it: an anonymous voice from a cellar is the whole point.
The sun you cannot see, the love you cannot feel, the God who does not answer.
Read the full story
The 1959 and 1963 printings are both in the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America collection, which covers American newspapers through 1963. That bounds what we can claim: 2 January 1959 is the earliest appearance we could document in that archive, not necessarily the earliest anywhere. We found no earlier printing, and we did not find any printing that names an author.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt in 1929 and died at Bergen-Belsen in 1945, aged fifteen, after two years hidden in an Amsterdam annex. Her diary is among the most widely read books of the twentieth century. She is the name most often attached to this inscription, and there is no evidence she ever saw it: she was in hiding in Amsterdam, not in a cellar in Cologne, and the words surface in print years after her death with no mention of her.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
The primary source (Chicago)
Anonymous inscription, cellar wall, Cologne; quoted in The Key West Citizen (Key West, FL), January 2, 1959, image 5, and in The Phoenix Jewish News (Phoenix, AZ), May 3, 1963, image 8.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when feeling it not. I believe in God even when He is silent’?” Last verified 12 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-believe-in-the-sun-even-when-it-is-not-shining-i-believe/