If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there
Carroll’s scene — but not Carroll’s sentenceLewis Carroll1832–1898 · English author & mathematician
?Attribution status: The idea is traceable to Carroll; this wording is a 20th-century proverb with no single author.?Reuse status: Rights unconfirmed
The thought is his, the sentence is not. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ↗ the Cheshire Cat answers Alice’s “which way I ought to go from here?” with “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to”, and when she says she does not much care, “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.” That is a conditional, not a slogan. Quote Investigator ↗ tracks the compressed modern proverb through the twentieth century — paraphrases credited to the Caterpillar in 1910 and to the Cat in 1913, then the familiar wording from 1941–42 — and concludes it “evolved from the dialog between Alice and the Cheshire cat”. Nobody in particular wrote it; it accreted.
“If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there” Not Lewis Carroll's words. A 20th-century proverb that grew out of his Cheshire Cat scene in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865); the modern wording is documented from 1941. Source: Quotle.info · Verbatim: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
Can you use it?
? We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the world of Lewis Carroll — English author, mathematician & logician. Theme: "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there". 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 "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there". 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 real passage, and what grew out of it
The scene
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Chapter
VI, “Pig and Pepper” (1865)
This wording, first in QI’s chronology
1941 — Harry S. Albert, then Algo Henderson (December 1941)
Occurrences in Carroll
None — “any road” appears nowhere in his twelve English books
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where—” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. “—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation. “Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
Chapter VI
Transcribed from the Project Gutenberg text of the 1865 book. The Cat is being precise, not aphoristic: if you have no destination, then the choice of road carries no information. The proverb keeps the logic and throws away the conditional, which is what makes it quotable and what makes it not Carroll.
We read the passage in the Project Gutenberg text of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ↗ and transcribed it above from Chapter VI. We then searched twelve of Carroll’s English works — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, The Nursery “Alice”, The Hunting of the Snark, Phantasmagoria and Other Poems, Songs from Alice, Sylvie and Bruno, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, A Tangled Tale, The Game of Logic and Symbolic Logic — for the modern sentence and its parts. “Any road” appears zero times; “if you don’t know where you’re going” appears zero times. The only hit anywhere in the corpus is the Cat’s own “where you want to get to”, in Wonderland.
Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗ is the anchor for the descent. It records paraphrases of the scene circulating early — The Railroad Telegrapher in December 1910 giving a version to the Caterpillar, Country Life in America in December 1913 giving one to the Cheshire cat — and then the modern compressed form arriving in 1941: Harry S. Albert in October and Algo Henderson in The Michigan Librarian in December, both as “When a man does not know where he is going, any road will take him to his destination”. Manmatha Nath Chatterjee has it in Social Science in April 1942 in almost exactly today’s wording.
From there it was claimed by everyone. QI records it being labelled an Oriental proverb in 1944, an ancient Hindu saying in 1945, and the Talmud in 1958 and again in 1990; Henry Miller used it in 1957 and Theodore Levitt in the Harvard Business Review in 1960. QI states plainly that it “has not yet found evidence supporting an ancient origin for the saying”. The Carroll credit is one more label in that queue — closer to the truth than the Talmud, but still a label.
The line also has a genuine modern author people forget: George Harrison used it for the song “Any Road” ↗, which QI places in 2002 and which Wikipedia records as the opening track of his posthumous album Brainwashed, and Tom Magliozzi of Car Talk ↗ has it as a sourced quotation in In Our Humble Opinion (2000). Both are users, decades downstream, not originators.
No reuse badge, and the reason is worth reading. Two different things are on this page. The Cheshire Cat passage quoted above is unambiguously public domain: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, far before the 1931 United States cutoff, and is freely readable in full at Project Gutenberg ↗ — quote it as much as you like. The sentence in the headline is not that passage. It is a twentieth-century proverb with no single author and no single first publication, whose documented printings run from 1941 onwards and are separately in copyright to their own publishers. We will not certify a reuse status for a wording we cannot tie to a work, so we assert none.
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
Almost nobody who quotes this is trying to mislead — the sentence really does come out of Carroll, just not out of his pen. It has also been credited to considerably stranger sources.
~
Most commonLewis Carroll, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Mis-sourced
The sentence is not in the book. What is in Chapter VI ↗ is the Cat’s conditional: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to… Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.” QI ↗ dates the compressed wording to 1941, seventy-six years later.
~
Earliest in printHarry S. Albert, October 1941 Earliest in print
the first appearance of the modern form in QI’s chronology ↗: “When a man does not know where he is going, any road will take him to his destination.” Algo Henderson has it two months later; Manmatha Nath Chatterjee reaches today’s wording in April 1942. QI does not call any of them the originator — it concludes they “helped to popularize the proverb but did not create it”.
✕
Also claimed byThe Talmud, an “ancient Hindu saying”, an “Oriental proverb” Refuted
All three labels are in QI’s record ↗ — 1944, 1945, 1958 and 1990 — and QI states it “has not yet found evidence supporting an ancient origin for the saying”. A 1941 American aphorism collected four separate ancient pedigrees in fifty years.
~
Later usersGeorge Harrison (2002) and Tom Magliozzi (2000) Popularizer, not author
Harrison built the song “Any Road” on the line for Brainwashed; Wikiquote sources ↗ the same sentence to Magliozzi’s In Our Humble Opinion (2000). Both are six decades downstream of the 1941 citations.
✓The honest attribution is a two-parter: the idea is Carroll’s, from the Cheshire Cat in Chapter VI of Wonderland ↗; the sentence is a twentieth-century proverb documented from 1941, and Quote Investigator ↗ concludes it evolved from that scene rather than being written by anyone.
Context
Why it mattered
The compression is the whole story. Carroll’s Cat states a conditional — if your destination is unspecified, the choice of road carries no information — which is a logician’s joke and faintly cruel. The proverb turns it into advice: know where you are going. Those are almost opposite speech acts, and the second is the one that ended up in every strategy deck since 1960.
That is also why it travelled. A conditional is hard to put on a slide; an imperative is easy. Theodore Levitt got it into the Harvard Business Review in 1960, Henry Kissinger was quoting a version in 1980, and by the time George Harrison built a song around it in 2002 it had been an Oriental proverb, a Hindu saying and the Talmud. The Cheshire Cat, appropriately, kept disappearing and leaving the grin.
The Cat states a conditional. The proverb turns it into advice. Those are almost opposite things.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1832–1898 · English author, mathematician & logician
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson — Lewis Carroll on the title page — taught mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford for most of his adult life, and wrote the two Alice books and a shelf of logic puzzles alongside it. His actual sentences are odd in a specific way: precise, deadpan, and usually about the rules of language rather than about feelings. That is worth knowing, because the lines invented for him are almost always the opposite — warm, motivational, and about you.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
The primary source (Chicago)
The scene: Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (London: Macmillan, 1865), chap. 6, "Pig and Pepper." The wording: a 20th-century proverb with no single author; earliest documented instances October and December 1941 (Harry S. Albert; Algo Henderson, The Michigan Librarian), per Quote Investigator.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there’?” Last verified 16 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-you-dont-know-where-youre-going-any-road-will-take-you/