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Who really said it

If I Shoot at the Sun, I May Hit a Star

Not George Herbert — first credited to P. T. Barnum George Herbert 1593–1633 · English poet and Anglican priest
Disputed Free to reuse

Herbert supplied the thought, not the sentence. Quote Investigator ↗ calls his 1633 verse — “who aimeth at the sky, / Shoots higher much then he that means a tree” — “an important aboriginal source” for this whole family of sayings, but the sun-and-star wording appears nowhere in his work. Its earliest known printing is an 1891 quotation book compiled by an Oakland church society, where it sits under P. T. Barnum’s name with no source attached — and Quote Investigator found no Barnum book or interview containing it.

Last verified 7 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“If I Shoot at the Sun, I May Hit a Star” Not George Herbert. "If I shoot at the sun, I may hit a star" first appears in print in More Borrowings (San Francisco: C. A. Murdock & Co., 1891), p. 24, credited to P. T. Barnum with no source; Quote Investigator found no Barnum book or interview containing it. Herbert's related 1633 verse in "The Church-porch" reads: "Sink not in spirit. Who aimeth at the sky, / Shoots higher much then he that means a tree." — Quotle.info

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Provenance

The oldest known printing of this wording

Earliest known printing
More Borrowings
Published
Comp. Ladies of the First Unitarian Church of Oakland, California. San Francisco: C. A. Murdock & Co., 1891 — page 24.
Credited there to
“P. T. Barnum” — a bare name, with no book, date or page given.
Herbert’s actual verse
“The Church-porch,” in The Temple (1633) — a different sentence, about the sky and a tree.

Jealousy is a secret avowal of inferiority.
— Massillon.

If I shoot at the sun, I may hit a star.
— P. T. Barnum.

The world is a school, and the business of its occupants, the pursuit of an education fitting them to graduate into the invisible university of God.
— W. R. Alger. More Borrowings, 1891, p. 24

How the line actually appears — one entry in an unsourced anthology. Every item in the volume carries a name and nothing else, and the book’s own index confirms the page: “Barnum, P. T., 24.”

Scanned book, 1891
Read More Borrowings (1891) at the Internet Archive
Quote Investigator: If I Shoot at the Sun, I May Hit a Star

The paper trail

  • 1633 — the verse the whole family grew from. Herbert’s “The Church-porch,” the opening poem of The Temple, reads: “Sink not in spirit. Who aimeth at the sky, / Shoots higher much then he that means a tree.” A sky and a tree — no sun and no star in the verse. Neither “shoot at the sun” nor “hit a star” occurs anywhere in the poem. Read it at Wikisource ↗
  • 1846 and 1879 — what Victorians actually put in Herbert’s mouth. Quote Investigator finds his name attached twice, and both times to a moon version: “we had better shoot at the moon if we want to hit a high mark” (The English Review, December 1846) and “that it is good to shoot at the moon even though you only hit a tree” (1879). Neither is the sun-and-star sentence. See QI’s citation list ↗
  • 1891 — the wording surfaces, already unsourced. On page 24 of More Borrowings, compiled by the Ladies of the First Unitarian Church of Oakland, California, the sentence appears under the name “P. T. Barnum” and no other information. It is the earliest instance Quote Investigator could find, and it appeared in the year Barnum died. Read the scan ↗
  • The compilers have form. The companion volume by the same Oakland church society, Borrowings (1889), was for many years the earliest known source of Emerson’s “better mousetrap” line. Compiler Sarah S. B. Yule later explained the method herself: she had copied words “from an address delivered long years ago” into a private handbook, and “when we were compiling ‘Borrowings’ I drew from this old handbook freely.” Quote Investigator on the mousetrap ↗
Public domain

Both the sentence and the verse behind it are long out of copyright in the United States. More Borrowings — the volume carrying the earliest known printing of this wording — was published in San Francisco in 1891, decades before the 1931 threshold, and the Internet Archive’s scan is marked not in copyright. George Herbert’s The Temple dates to 1633.

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

Three credits, no origin

This is a proverb that has been handed from name to name for nearly two centuries, rearranging its own scenery as it goes. Three credits circulate for it, and not one of them is documented as the source of this wording.

George Herbert the credit on most quote pages

Herbert did write a genuinely related verse in 1633, and Quote Investigator calls it “an important aboriginal source” for the whole class of sayings. But it is a different sentence: “who aimeth at the sky, / Shoots higher much then he that means a tree.” The words “shoot at the sun” and “hit a star” appear nowhere in “The Church-porch” ↗, and Herbert’s own Outlandish Proverbs ↗ contains no proverb mentioning a star at all.

P. T. Barnum the oldest credit

The 1891 anthology is the first known appearance of the sentence and it does print his name — but after searching, Quote Investigator reports ↗ it “was unable to find direct evidence, i.e., a book by Barnum or an interview containing the statement.” The credit surfaced in 1891, the year Barnum died, in a small church-society giftbook that sourced nothing it printed. The line is absent from Wikiquote’s Barnum page ↗ entirely.

Norman Vincent Peale, W. Clement Stone and Les Brown the moon-and-stars descendants

The version most people meet today — “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars” — is a twentieth-century descendant of the same proverb, not an original. Quote Investigator dates it to Peale in 1988, to W. Clement Stone in a 1996 Usenet post and to Les Brown in 2000, with Britney Spears offering her own version the same year. QI tracks all of them ↗

It is a proverb, not a quotation. Its oldest known printing is page 24 of More Borrowings (1891) ↗, where it sits under P. T. Barnum’s name with no source — and nobody has yet found it in anything Barnum, or Herbert, actually wrote.

Context

A proverb that keeps rearranging its own sky

The saying has been swapping its props for two centuries, and Quote Investigator’s chronology shows how freely. Shoot at the moon and hit the top of the highest tree, said an 1859 novel — already calling it “the old saying.” Shoot at the stars and you may hit a tree, said the Saturday Review in 1865. Shoot an arrow at the sun every morning, a Michigan paper reported a speaker at an 1876 pioneers’ reunion urging, and when told the sun could not be hit he answered: “You will hit higher than if you aimed lower.” By 1904 a Cleveland paper was running the form as a joke: “Aim at a chorus girl,” and you may hit a star.

Astronomy is the part that never settles, because astronomy was never the point. What survives intact from Herbert’s 1633 stanza is the argument underneath — aim high and you will overshoot whatever you would have reached by aiming low. The celestial furniture is decoration, and it is the decoration, rather than the thought, that keeps being reattributed to whoever is most famous at the time.

Sink not in spirit. Who aimeth at the sky, / Shoots higher much then he that means a tree.

The full chain, 1633 to 2000

1633 — George Herbert, “The Church-porch”: aim at the sky, not at a tree.

1846 — The English Review credits Herbert with a moon version: “we had better shoot at the moon if we want to hit a high mark.”

1859 — already “the old saying”: “Shoot at the moon and you will hit the top of the highest tree.”

1876 — the sun enters, as the target for a daily arrow.

1891 — the sun-and-star wording appears in print for the first time, under P. T. Barnum’s name, in More Borrowings.

1914 — a Michigan bakery uses “P. T. Barnum said…” to sell Harvest Bread.

1941 — Jane Russell gives an Associated Press interviewer the moon version: “If we aim at the moon—we may hit a star!”

1988–2000 — the moon-and-stars rewrite is used or credited in turn by Norman Vincent Peale, W. Clement Stone, Britney Spears and Les Brown.

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Filed under

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

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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: If I Shoot at the Sun, I May Hit a Starquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive chronology, 1633 to 2012, with each instance pinned to a dated publication and, where available, page and column.
More Borrowings (1891), full scanarchive.org

The earliest known printing of the exact wording, on page 24, credited to P. T. Barnum with no source given.
The Temple: "The Church-porch"en.wikisource.org

Herbert's genuine 1633 verse about aiming at the sky, and confirmation that the sun-and-star line is not in the poem.
Outlandish Proverbs, with translationsccel.org

Herbert's own proverb collection, where a Herbert-attributed proverb would live if it were real. It contains no saying about a star.
George Herberten.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote's Herbert page, which does not list this line in any section: not sourced, not disputed, not misattributed.
Quote Origin: If You Build a Better Mousetrap...quoteinvestigator.com

On Borrowings (1889), the companion volume by the same compilers, and how its compiler gathered unsourced lines from a private notebook.

The poet behind the idea

George Herbert wrote the verse, not the proverb

George Herbert

1593–1633 · English poet, orator and Anglican priest

George Herbert (3 April 1593 – 1 March 1633) was an English poet, orator and priest of the Church of England, and the quietest of the metaphysical poets. Shortly before he died he sent the manuscript of his English poems to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, who published them in 1633 as The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations; its opening poem, “The Church-porch,” carries the aim-high stanza that everything here descends from. Herbert was also a working collector of proverbs — his Outlandish Proverbs (1640) gathered over a thousand sayings from many countries — and that, more than anything he actually wrote, is why anonymous folk wisdom keeps drifting onto his name.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented source

Earliest documented in More Borrowings, comp. Ladies of the First Unitarian Church of Oakland, California (San Francisco: C. A. Murdock & Co., 1891), 24, where the line is credited to P. T. Barnum with no source given. Chronology traced in “Quote Origin: If I Shoot at the Sun, I May Hit a Star,” Quote Investigator, November 20, 2012. Herbert’s related verse: George Herbert, “The Church-porch,” in The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (1633).

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If I Shoot at the Sun, I May Hit a Star’?” Last verified 7 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-i-shoot-at-the-sun-i-may-hit-a-star/

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