Did Socrates say "Is it true? Is it good? Is it useful?"?

Q: Did Socrates say "Is it true? Is it good? Is it useful?"?

No. The anecdote — a man arrives with gossip, Socrates stops him and asks whether the story passes three filters: truth, goodness, usefulness — appears in no ancient text whatsoever. Socrates wrote nothing, so it would have to be in Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes or Diogenes Laërtius. It is in none of the four. It is a travelling moral tale: German-speaking sources tell it as Die drei Siebe, 'the three sieves,' and Ottoman tradition tells a version under the name of Nasreddin Hodja. Socrates is a coat of paint, not the origin.

Who really said it

Is it true? Is it good? Is it useful?

Not Socrates — a moral tale with no classical source Unknown Anonymous · a travelling folk anecdote, no ancient source located

A good story. Just not a Greek one. Rights unconfirmed

The anecdote — a man arrives with gossip, Socrates stops him and asks whether the story passes three filters: truth, goodness, usefulness — appears in no ancient text whatsoever. Socrates wrote nothing, so it would have to be in Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes or Diogenes Laërtius. It is in none of the four. It is a travelling moral tale: German-speaking sources tell it as Die drei Siebe, ‘the three sieves,’ and Ottoman tradition tells a version under the name of Nasreddin Hodja. Socrates is a coat of paint, not the origin.

Last verified 21 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Is it true? Is it good? Is it useful?” Not Socrates. An anonymous moral tale with no classical source; it appears in none of Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes or Diogenes Laertius, and Ottoman tradition tells a version of it about Nasreddin Hodja. Via Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Socrates. Use the credit shown above instead.

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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.

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In context

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Provenance

The source

Origin: Unknown — an anonymous moral tale
Classical source: None located, in any language
Other names attached: Nasreddin Hodja, in Ottoman tradition
German title: ‘Die drei Siebe’ — the three sieves

Before you tell me, let the story pass three filters. The first is truth: are you certain that what you are about to tell me is true? The second is goodness: is it something good? The third is usefulness: will it be useful to me? The modern circulating text

The core of the anecdote as it travels today, in the form you will meet it on social media. It is a genuinely useful test — and it is worth noticing that the third filter, usefulness, quietly does most of the work, since almost no gossip survives it.

Die drei Siebe des Sokrates — the German tradition and the Nasreddin parallel

How we traced it

The four-source test settles it. Socrates left no writings, so a story about Socrates has to be told by Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes or Diogenes Laërtius — the last of whom made a career of collecting exactly this kind of philosophical anecdote and quip. None of them tells it. If Diogenes Laërtius had known this story, he would have used it; it is precisely his sort of material.
The tale is older than the Socrates label but younger than Socrates. German-language reference sources circulate it as Die drei Siebe des Sokrates, and note that Ottoman writings tell a version of the same test under the name of the wise fool Nasreddin Hodja the German tradition ↗. A story that changes its sage as it crosses a border is folklore, not testimony.
In English it spread mostly as a forwarded email in the early 2000s, and its phrasing shows it: the vocabulary and sentence rhythm are modern English, not a translation from Greek. We could not establish a first printed appearance, and we are not going to invent one.

Rights are indeterminate, so we make no claim. The anecdote has no identified author and no established date or place of first publication, which means its copyright status cannot be resolved — and any particular retelling you find online is its own author’s text. The underlying story appears to be old folklore in the public domain; a given modern wording of it may not be. Retell it in your own words and attribute it as an anonymous tale. This is not legal advice.

Fact-check

The attribution problem

This is an anecdote rather than a sentence, which is why it slips past people: nobody thinks to fact-check a story the way they would fact-check a quotation. The result is a tale told about a real man that never happened.

Not Socrates no classical source

Absent from Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes and Diogenes Laërtius — the only four routes by which anything about Socrates reaches us. Diogenes Laërtius in particular collected exactly this genre of anecdote and does not have it.

Nasreddin Hodja same story, different name

Ottoman tradition attaches a version of the three-filters test to Nasreddin Hodja. When the same tale is told about whichever wise man the audience already respects, that is the definition of folklore the German account ↗.

Modern, and anonymous chain-email vintage

The wording that circulates in English reads as modern English prose, not as a translation from Greek, and spread widely through forwarded emails and then social media. No first printing has been identified.

The German branch same test, older packaging

German sources tell it as Die drei Siebe — sieves rather than filters — and use it as a schoolroom lesson about gossip. It is the same three questions in older clothing, and it is no better sourced to antiquity.

The first teller open

We found no earliest printed version, in any language, that we can stand behind. That gap is the honest state of the evidence, and we would rather leave it visible than fill it with a plausible-looking citation.

An anonymous moral tale with no source in antiquity. Socrates is the most commercially useful name to hang it on; Ottoman tradition hangs the same story on Nasreddin Hodja.

Context

Why it resonates

The test is genuinely good advice, which is the whole problem. Because it works — three questions, and almost nothing you were about to repeat survives them — people are disinclined to check whether the man credited with it ever said it.

It also flatters the teller. Repeating the story is a way of announcing that you do not repeat stories, which is a neat trick for an anecdote about gossip to pull off.

Tell the same story about whichever sage your audience respects, and you have folklore.

Why the four-source rule is decisive here

Socrates published nothing in his lifetime and left no manuscripts.

Plato wrote him as the central speaker of the dialogues — philosophically rich, but shaped by Plato’s own purposes.

Xenophon, a soldier, gives a plainer and more practical Socrates in the Memorabilia.

Aristophanes lampooned him on stage in the Clouds while he was alive.

Diogenes Laërtius, writing centuries later, compiled the philosophers’ sayings, jokes and comebacks — the exact bin this story would sit in.

The three-filters tale is in none of them. There is no fifth source to appeal to.

Explore

Filed under

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

Truth Kindness

Go further

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.

Die drei Siebe des Sokrateskarrierebibel.de

German-language treatment noting the Ottoman version told of Nasreddin Hodja rather than Socrates.

The Three Sieves of Socrates: did it really happen?wemystic.com

Sets out plainly that the tale appears in no classical source and reaches us only through later retellings.

Socrates — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Background on why everything about Socrates is second-hand — the ‘Socratic problem.’

The Socratic problemen.wikipedia.org

The scholarly question of what can be known about the historical Socrates, and from whom.

Popularly credited author

Why it gets pinned on Socrates

Socrates

c. 470–399 BC · Athenian philosopher

Socrates is the patron saint of the awkward question, so a story in which a man is stopped mid-gossip and interrogated about his own premises sounds exactly like him. It is also the reason the label sticks: he wrote nothing, and the four writers who transmit him disagree with each other enough that readers assume there must be more out there. There is not. The corpus is closed, and this story is not in it — which is why the same tale is told of Nasreddin Hodja wherever Socrates is not the local byword for wisdom.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Anonymous anecdote, commonly titled ‘the triple filter test’ or, in German, ‘Die drei Siebe.’ No classical source located; a parallel version is told of Nasreddin Hodja in Ottoman tradition.

MLA (9th ed.)

“The triple filter test.” Anonymous anecdote; no classical source located.

APA (7th ed.)

The triple filter test. (n.d.). Anonymous anecdote [no classical source located].

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really told the Socrates ‘triple filter test’ story?” Last verified 21 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/is-it-true-is-it-good-is-it-useful