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Who really said it

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see

Christian Nestell Bovee, 1857 — not Twain Christian Nestell Bovee 1820–1904 · American aphorist and epigrammatist
Disputed Free to reuse

The line is Christian Nestell Bovee’s, from Thoughts, Feelings, and Fancies in 1857 — and in his hands it was shorter and stranger: kindness as ‘a language which the dumb can speak, and the deaf can understand.’ The blind arrive later; a version carrying all three appears by 1907. Mark Twain had nothing to do with it. He died in 1910, and the first located Twain credit is from 1942, in a syndicated Walter Winchell column.

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

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see” Not Mark Twain. Christian Nestell Bovee wrote the original in 1857: "A language which the dumb can speak, and the deaf can understand."

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

Can you use it?

Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Mark Twain — American author and humorist. Theme: "Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see". 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 "Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see". 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 source

Document
Thoughts, Feelings, and Fancies
Author
Christian Nestell Bovee (1820–1904)
Published
1857; revised in Intuitions & Summaries of Thought, 1862
Twain source
None — first credited to him in 1942

A language which the dumb can speak, and the deaf can understand. Bovee, 1857

Bovee’s wording, and worth reading twice — it is a better sentence than the one that replaced it. He is making a specific claim about who can transmit and who can receive. The modern version swaps his precision for symmetry, which scans better on a poster.

Quote Investigator — the full 1857-to-1942 trail

How we traced it

  • Bovee published the thought in 1857 and reworked it for his 1862 collection. It was reprinted through the 1860s in newspapers and magazines, and was still being correctly credited to Bovee as late as 1903, in a Syracuse publication the citation trail ↗.
  • The wording drifted. Bovee’s original pairs the dumb with the deaf; the blind are a later addition, and a version carrying all three disabilities is in circulation by 1907. The form people quote today is a century of anonymous editing, not a sentence anybody wrote in one go.
  • The Twain credit is 1942 at the earliest, in a Walter Winchell column, and it hardened in the 1990s through a run of self-help anthologies — A Compendium of Caring Thought among them. The Center for Mark Twain Studies traces the modern explosion to a single Twitter account posting it repeatedly from January 2008, after which charities with millions of followers picked it up the social-media trail ↗.
Public domain

Free to reproduce. Bovee died in 1904 and the text was published in 1857, so it is public domain everywhere by a wide margin — and the same is true of any Twain text, since he died in 1910. The only thing at stake here is credit, not permission: quote it freely, but quote it to Bovee. If you use the modern ‘blind can see’ wording, no individual owns that either; it is an anonymous drift, not an authored revision. This is not legal advice.

Fact-check

The attribution problem

This is a well-documented case with a named real author and a datable moment of theft, which makes it unusually satisfying to correct. Bovee wrote it, the wording drifted for fifty years, and then a columnist handed it to a dead man.

Not Mark Twain no source, and 32 years late

Nothing in Twain’s books, letters, notebooks or reported speech. The earliest Twain credit anyone has located is 1942, in a Walter Winchell column — thirty-two years after his death and eighty-five years after Bovee published it the trail ↗.

Christian Nestell Bovee, 1857 documented

Bovee was a New York aphorist whose collections sold well and are now almost entirely forgotten — which is precisely why his lines keep getting reassigned to more famous men. He was still being correctly credited in print in 1903.

Not Bovee’s either, exactly century of drift

Bovee wrote ‘dumb’ and ‘deaf.’ The blind appear later, with an all-three version by 1907. So the sentence people quote is Bovee’s idea in anonymous clothes: honest attribution names him as the origin, not as the author of that exact string.

Eulogies, sermons, charity accounts high-trust venues

It travels through the settings where nobody checks: funeral readings, sermon illustrations, kindness campaigns. The Center for Mark Twain Studies documents large advocacy accounts amplifying the Twain version from 2008 onward, which is how a 19th-century epigram became a 21st-century meme with the wrong name on it CMTS ↗.

Christian Nestell Bovee, Thoughts, Feelings, and Fancies, 1857. Mark Twain was first credited in 1942, thirty-two years after he died the source ↗.

Context

Why it resonates

It gives kindness a job description. Most sayings about kindness tell you to be kind; this one tells you what kindness does — it gets through when the ordinary channels are closed. That is a genuinely useful thought, and it is why the line lives in eulogies and sermons rather than in argument.

It is also, read literally, a sentence about disability written by people who were not thinking very hard about disability. Deaf and blind readers have pointed out for years that they are being used as a metaphor for inaccessibility rather than addressed as an audience. Bovee’s original at least kept the claim concrete.

Bovee wrote it in 1857. Winchell handed it to Twain in 1942.

How the wording changed, 1857 to now

1857: Bovee publishes it in Thoughts, Feelings, and Fancies — a language the dumb can speak and the deaf can understand.

1862: he revises it for Intuitions & Summaries of Thought.

1861–1863: newspaper and magazine reprints carry it outward.

1903: still correctly credited to Bovee in a Syracuse publication.

1907: a version in circulation that names all three — dumb, deaf and blind.

1942: Walter Winchell’s syndicated column attaches it to Mark Twain.

1990s: a run of self-help anthologies repeats the Twain credit; one, Meladee McCarty’s Daily Journal of Kindness (1996), gets it right.

2008 onward: a Twitter account posts the Twain version repeatedly and large advocacy accounts amplify it.

Explore

Filed under

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

Kindness Love

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.

Quote Origin: Kindness Is a Language Which the Deaf Can Hearquoteinvestigator.com

The citation-by-citation trail from Bovee’s 1857 original to the 1942 Winchell column that first said Twain.
The Apocryphal Twain: 'Kindness is language the deaf can hear'marktwainstudies.com

The Center for Mark Twain Studies on how the 1990s self-help books and a 2008 Twitter account built the modern misattribution.

Popularly credited author

Why it gets pinned on Twain

Mark Twain

1835–1910 · American author and humorist

Mark Twain is the default author for any unattributed English aphorism, the way Einstein is for anything about physics or genius. Twain scholars call this the gravitational pull of a famous name. What makes this particular case odd is that the sentiment does not sound like him at all: the Center for Mark Twain Studies points out that Twain’s actual view of humanity was corrosively pessimistic, and warm inspirational uplift is the last register you would expect from the man who wrote The Mysterious Stranger. He gets credited anyway, because a greetings-card line needs a great name and his is the one everybody has.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Bovee, Christian Nestell. Thoughts, Feelings, and Fancies. 1857. Original wording: ‘A language which the dumb can speak, and the deaf can understand.’ No Mark Twain source exists.

MLA (9th ed.)

Bovee, Christian Nestell. Thoughts, Feelings, and Fancies. 1857.

APA (7th ed.)

Bovee, C. N. (1857). Thoughts, feelings, and fancies.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear’?” Last verified 21 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/kindness-is-the-language-which-the-deaf-can-hear

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