Lose As If You Like It, and Win As If You Are Used to It
Not Ralph Waldo Emerson — an anonymous sporting adageAnonymousA turf-and-polo maxim · in print in full by 1929, quoted as already current; half of it in print by 1920
Quote Investigator traced the saying and found no evidence connecting it to Emerson: the earliest known trace is an unattributed half-line in a 1920 tennis report in The Times of London, and the first full version sits in Harry S. Page’s 1929 racing memoir Between the Flags — printed inside quotation marks as an adage already in circulation, with no author named. A name is attached only from 1943, when a Texas newspaper signed it “Thomas Hitchcock” — and even then the polo star’s son was quoting it as his father’s advice, not his father’s invention.
“Lose As If You Like It, and Win As If You Are Used to It” Lose as if you like it, and win as if you were used to it. — Anonymous sporting adage; quoted as already current in Harry S. Page's Between the Flags (Derrydale Press, 1929), with half of it already in print in 1920. Widely credited to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but Quote Investigator found no evidence for that attribution. Via quotle.info · Verbatim: “Win as if you are used to it. Lose as if you liked it.”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Ralph Waldo Emerson. 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.
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In context
Evoking the themes of character, success and failure. Theme: "Lose As If You Like It, and Win As If You Are Used to It". 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 "Lose As If You Like It, and Win As If You Are Used to It". 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
Where the saying actually comes from
Earliest fragment
The Times (London), 27 April 1920 — report on the Tennis Amateur Championship
Earliest full form
Between the Flags: The Recollections of a Gentleman Rider
Publication
Harry S. Page · The Derrydale Press, New York · 1929, p. 209
First named credit
Lockhart Post Register, Lockhart, Texas, 22 April 1943 — signed “Thomas Hitchcock”
In racing, the rough and the smooth are so quickly interchangeable that the only path safe from the ridiculous, is the one guarded by “Win as if you are used to it. Lose as if you liked it.”
Between the Flags, 1929, p. 209
Page sets the maxim inside quotation marks and names nobody — the standard signal that a writer is passing on a saying already in circulation rather than minting one. This is the earliest full-form appearance Quote Investigator has located.
1920 — half the adage, no author. A tennis report in The Times of London praises the player E. L. Phillips for having “learned the most difficult thing in all games, to lose as if he liked it” — the earliest relevant trace, transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗.
1929 — both halves, in quotation marks. Harry S. Page’s racing memoir Between the Flags quotes it as an existing rule of the turf: “Win as if you are used to it. Lose as if you liked it.” No author is named, and none is implied (citation and page reference at QI ↗).
1942–1943 — a name attaches. The Edwardsville Intelligencer in Illinois ran it as unsigned filler in 1942; the following April a Texas paper, the Lockhart Post Register, printed it signed “Thomas Hitchcock.” A year after that Newsweek quoted the polo champion Tommy Hitchcock Jr. ↗ crediting the advice to his father.
Nowhere in Emerson. The line appears in no section of Wikiquote’s Emerson page ↗ — not among the work-by-work sourced quotations, nor in its Attributed, Disputed or Misattributed lists. Emerson died in 1882 ↗, decades before the adage is first documented in print.
The exact modern wording is an anonymous adage with no identified author, so there is no creator to whom a copyright could attach and no basis for calling this specific phrasing public domain — the status is left open rather than asserted. The two early printings that carry it, the 1920 Times tennis report and Harry S. Page’s Between the Flags (The Derrydale Press, 1929), were both published before 1931 and are themselves in the public domain in the United States, but neither is the origin of the saying.
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
Who gets the credit, and why none of it holds
This is a proverb that has been handed a different owner roughly once a decade. Quote Investigator’s own question opens by listing eight candidate names; its conclusion keeps none of them as the coiner.
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The popular creditRalph Waldo Emerson No basis
Quote Investigator ↗ reports it has “found no compelling evidence linking the coinage of the saying to Emerson or Golnik.” No essay, lecture, letter or journal entry is ever named, and the aggregator pages that carry the Emerson credit — AZQuotes among them ↗ — give no source line at all. The line is also absent from every section of Wikiquote’s Emerson page ↗, sourced and unsourced alike.
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The reference-book creditEric Mark Golnik Uncited
The 1997 Dictionary of Quotations in Communications printed the “lose as if you enjoyed it for a change” variant under Golnik’s name with no citation attached — more than half a century after the adage was already circulating in print, as Quote Investigator documents ↗.
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The sporting creditThomas Hitchcock Sr. Used it, did not coin it
The strongest of the claims, and still not coinage. His son told Newsweek in 1944 that “Father always emphasized being a good sportsman” and quoted the maxim — but the adage was already in print, unattributed, in full in 1929 and in part in 1920. QI’s verdict ↗ is that there is evidence Hitchcock Sr. used it and that his son relayed it.
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Later relayersJock Whitney, Mrs. F. Ambrose Clark, Desi Arnaz, Rosalind Russell Passing it on
Each is recorded passing the maxim on between the 1950s and the 1960s — Time crediting the counsel to the late Mrs. F. Ambrose Clark, Whitney attributing it to an old trainer who advised his mother, Arnaz recalling it from a school locker-room sign. Quote Investigator ↗ concludes they “relayed the saying, but did not formulate it.”
✓The honest answer is that nobody owns this one. In the earliest citations known to Quote Investigator ↗ the adage is anonymous — a piece of racecourse and polo-field wisdom that was already common property by 1929, and that acquired famous owners only after the fact.
Context
Why a locker-room proverb ended up wearing Emerson’s name
This is a working maxim, not a literary one. It grew up in the horse-racing and polo world — the domain where a man might win the American Grand National one week and be picking himself out of the turf the next — and its whole point is behavioural: keep your face the same in both directions. Harry S. Page put it in his 1929 racing memoir as the one guard against looking ridiculous, and by the 1950s it had migrated to a locker-room sign in a Miami high school, where Desi Arnaz read it ↗ and later wrote it down.
Proverbs with no author are unstable, and unstable quotations drift toward famous names. Emerson is one of the strongest attractors in English — aphoristic, endlessly anthologised, and safely out of copyright — so a well-made anonymous line about winning and losing gets filed under his name and then copied from database to database. The tell is what is missing: no essay, no lecture, no journal entry, no page number. Quote sites that credit him ↗ give no source at all, because there is none to give.
Page printed it inside quotation marks in 1929 — the mark of a writer passing on a proverb, not coining one.
The relay chain, 1943–1997
1943 — the Lockhart Post Register in Texas runs it as a freestanding line signed “Thomas Hitchcock.”
1944 — Newsweek’s obituary-adjacent profile “Ten-Goal Hitchcock” quotes Tommy Hitchcock Jr. crediting the advice to his father; Reader’s Digest reprints it from Newsweek in 1946.
1954–1961 — Time attaches it to Mrs. F. Ambrose Clark, Desi Arnaz recalls it from a school locker room in 1955, and Rosalind Russell offers it as advice to a newspaper columnist in 1961.
1997 — the Dictionary of Quotations in Communications assigns it to Eric Mark Golnik with no citation, seeding a second false credit alongside Emerson’s.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1860–1941 · American polo pioneer and steeplechase trainer
Thomas Hitchcock Sr. organised the first polo match on Long Island in 1877, helped establish the Meadowbrook Polo Club in 1881, and became one of the earliest Americans rated at the maximum ten goals. He is equally remembered as the father of American steeplechasing — he trained thoroughbreds, won the American Grand National with Good and Plenty in 1906, and was elected to the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 1973. He is the first person any source names in connection with this adage, but the credit reaches us second-hand through his son Tommy Hitchcock Jr., who repeated it as something his father emphasised — and the maxim was already in print years before either Hitchcock was linked to it.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented appearance
Earliest documented in Harry S. Page, Between the Flags: The Recollections of a Gentleman Rider (New York: The Derrydale Press, 1929), 209, where the maxim is set in quotation marks as an adage already in circulation, with no author named; a partial precursor appears in an unsigned tennis report in The Times (London), 27 April 1920. Not found in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. See Quote Investigator, "Quote Origin: Lose As If You Like It, and Win As If You Are Used to It," 14 September 2012.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Lose As If You Like It, and Win As If You Are Used to It’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/lose-as-if-you-like-it-and-win-as-if-you-are-used-to-it/