No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path
Spoken byGautama Buddhac. 563 or 480 BCE – c. 483 or 400 BCE · Founder of Buddhism
✓Attribution status: Verified to a dated, published source — though these exact English words are Paul Carus’s 1911 verse rendering of Dhammapada 165, not a literal translation of the Pali.✓Reuse status: Free to reuse
The exact English appears as the hymn “Self-Reliance,” headed “Dhammapada, 165,” on p. 19 of Paul Carus’s Buddhist Hymns (Chicago: Open Court, 1911) — the scanned book is online ↗. The teaching is canonical, but Carus’s quatrain is a free versification: Max Müller’s translation of verse 165 says only that “no one can purify another.”
“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path” Paul Carus, "Self-Reliance," in Buddhist Hymns (Chicago: Open Court, 1911), 19; a versified rendering of Dhammapada 165.
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✓ Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.
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In context
Evoking the world of Gautama Buddha — Indian ascetic and teacher; founder of Buddhism. Theme: "No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path". 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 "No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path". 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
Work
Buddhist Hymns: Versified Translations from the Dhammapada and Various Other Sources, Adapted to Modern Music
Location
Hymn titled “Self-Reliance,” headed “Dhammapada, 165” — p. 19
Translation
Versified by Paul Carus (1852–1919). Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1911
Underlying verse
Dhammapada 165 (Chapter XII, “Self”), with the closing line tracking Dhammapada 276
By ourselves is evil done, By ourselves we pain endure, By ourselves we cease from wrong, By ourselves become we pure.
No one saves us but ourselves, No one can, and no one may; We ourselves must walk the path, Buddhas merely teach the way.
Hymn, p. 19
The popular three-sentence version is the second quatrain only, with the rhyming last line dropped and the commas and semicolon turned into full stops.
Wikiquote ↗ lists the full quatrain in its Dhammapada section — not among the misattributed entries — citing verse 165 and Paul Carus, and adding that a circulating variant of the fourth line has never been located in Carus’s original publications. Quote Investigator ↗ has no article on the line.
Wikiquote points to Carus’s pamphlet The Dharma (1896), but the Internet Archive’s full text of the 1896 third edition ↗ contains neither “no one saves us” nor “walk the path” anywhere in its 70 scanned pages.
The wording is in a different Carus book: Buddhist Hymns (Chicago: Open Court, 1911) ↗, where p. 19 carries a hymn titled “Self-Reliance,” headed “Dhammapada, 165,” set to music by Carus. Its second quatrain is the quote, word for word. His foreword describes the book as his own versifications of “these ancient and venerable stanzas.”
The Pali behind it is narrower. Max Müller renders verse 165 “By oneself the evil is done, by oneself one suffers… Purity and impurity belong to oneself, no one can purify another,” and verse 276 “You yourself must make an effort. The Tathagatas (Buddhas) are only preachers” (Wikisource ↗). Carus fused and heightened the two into a singable rhyme.
✓Public domain
The Pali Dhammapada is ancient and long out of copyright, and the English wording here comes from Paul Carus’s Buddhist Hymns, published in the United States by The Open Court Publishing Company in 1911 — well before the 1931 threshold, so it is in the public domain in the US. Note that this applies to Carus’s 1911 verse specifically: modern Dhammapada translations are separate works and remain under their own copyrights or licences.
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
What gets muddled
This one is real — a rarity among “Buddha quotes.” But almost every version circulating online misstates where it comes from, and three things in particular get muddled.
✕
The wordingPresented as a literal translation of the Pali Versification
Carus was writing singable hymns, not a crib. Müller’s translation of Dhammapada 165 ends “Purity and impurity belong to oneself, no one can purify another” — there is no “saves” and no “path” in it. Carus’s closing line tracks verse 276 instead: “You yourself must make an effort. The Tathagatas (Buddhas) are only preachers” (Wikisource ↗).
✕
The citationThe Dharma, or The Religion of Enlightenment (1896) Wrong book
Wikiquote attaches the quatrain to this Carus pamphlet, citing “Ch. 165, as translated in The Dharma, or The Religion of Enlightenment; An Exposition of Buddhism (1896) by Paul Carus” (Wikiquote ↗). Searching the Internet Archive’s full text of the 1896 third edition ↗ and the 1898 printing ↗ turns up no occurrence of “no one saves us” or “walk the path.” The lines are in Buddhist Hymns (1911).
✕
The fourth line“…but Buddhas clearly show the way” Variant
Wikiquote notes this variant has circulated for some years but “is not yet located in any of the original publications of Carus” (Wikiquote ↗). The 1911 hymn reads “Buddhas merely teach the way” — and the popular three-sentence version drops the line altogether, taking the rhyme with it.
✓Genuinely Buddhist in substance and genuinely traceable in wording — to Paul Carus’s hymn “Self-Reliance,” printed under the heading “Dhammapada, 165” on p. 19 of Buddhist Hymns (Open Court, 1911) ↗.
Context
Why a Buddhist verse rhymes in English
Paul Carus (1852–1919) was a German-American philosopher and the first managing editor of the Open Court Publishing Company in Chicago. Per Wikipedia ↗, his interest in Buddhism deepened after the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893; The Gospel of Buddha followed in 1894, and he later sponsored D. T. Suzuki’s translation work.
Buddhist Hymns went a step further than translation. Carus’s foreword explains that he had “frequently been induced to try my hand at the versification of these ancient and venerable stanzas,” and he set several of them to Western tunes — German chorals, folk melodies, and settings of his own — so that a congregation could sing the Dhammapada. That hymnal impulse is why this line scans, rhymes, and travels so well: it was built to be sung, not to be literal.
We ourselves must walk the path, Buddhas merely teach the way.
What Carus wrote in prose, before he wrote it in verse
In The Gospel of Buddha (1894), Carus had already rendered the same two verses in plain prose, in his chapter on the Dhammapada: “By oneself evil is done; by oneself one suffers; by oneself evil is left undone; by oneself one is purified. Purity and impurity belong to oneself, no one can purify another. You yourself must make an effort. The Tathāgatas are only preachers.” The full text is at Project Gutenberg ↗.
Set the two side by side and you can watch the famous line being made. “No one can purify another” becomes “No one saves us but ourselves”; “the Tathāgatas are only preachers” becomes “Buddhas merely teach the way.” Nothing is falsified — but the memorable words are the hymn-writer’s, not the translator’s and not the Pali’s.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
c. 5th–4th century BCE · Indian ascetic and teacher; founder of Buddhism
Siddhārtha Gautama was an ascetic and teacher in ancient northern India whose followers became the Buddhist community; Wikipedia gives his dates as c. 563 or 480 BCE to c. 483 or 400 BCE and notes that scholars still disagree by more than a century. He wrote nothing: his sayings were preserved orally and later fixed in the Pali canon, of which the Dhammapada — a collection of 423 verses — is the most quoted book in the West. Every English “Buddha quote” is therefore a translator’s sentence as much as his, which is exactly what makes this one worth tracing.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Paul Carus, “Self-Reliance,” in Buddhist Hymns: Versified Translations from the Dhammapada and Various Other Sources, Adapted to Modern Music (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1911), 19.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/no-one-saves-us-but-ourselves-no-one-can-and-no-one-may-we/