Who really said it

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall

Q: Did Confucius say "Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall"?

No. The line was written by the Anglo-Irish author Oliver Goldsmith in "The Citizen of the World" (1762), where it is spoken by his fictional Chinese philosopher Lien Chi Altangi: "Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." Because the character was a Chinese sage, readers assumed the wisdom was genuinely Chinese, and by 1831 it had been re-labelled "Confucius." No text in Confucius's own writings contains it.

Not Confucius — actually Oliver Goldsmith Oliver Goldsmith 1728–1774 · Anglo-Irish poet, playwright & novelist

Disputed Free to reuse

The line was written by the Anglo-Irish author Oliver Goldsmith in “The Citizen of the World” (1762), where it is spoken by his fictional Chinese philosopher Lien Chi Altangi: “Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” Because the character was a Chinese sage, readers assumed the wisdom was genuinely Chinese, and by 1831 it had been re-labelled “Confucius.” No text in Confucius’s own writings contains it.

Last verified 8 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall” Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World (1762) — commonly misattributed to Confucius

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

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Provenance

Where it really comes from

Work: The Citizen of the World; or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher
Author: Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774)
First published: 1762 (letters serialized 1760–61 in The Public Ledger)
Location: Letter VII, in the voice of the fictional Lien Chi Altangi

We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression … Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

Goldsmith gave a second version in Letter XXII: “True magnanimity consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”

Quote Investigator: full tracing of the saying

How we know

Oliver Goldsmith, “The Citizen of the World” (1762), Letter VII — the primary text literally reads “Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall” (Internet Archive full text).
Quote Investigator finds no evidence Confucius wrote it and credits Goldsmith; it notes the maxim was reassigned to Confucius in The Royal Lady’s Magazine by 1831.
Wikiquote lists the line under Goldsmith, sourced to The Citizen of the World, not among Confucius’s genuine sayings.

Public domain

Goldsmith’s “The Citizen of the World” was first published in 1762 and the author died in 1774, so the work and this sentence are firmly in the public domain worldwide.

Fact-check

Why everyone says ‘Confucius’

The wording is genuine 18th-century English prose — but it was never Confucius’s. It only sounds Chinese because Goldsmith deliberately put it in the mouth of a fictional Chinese sage.

Confucius misattributed

No line matching this appears in the Analects or any authentic Confucian text. Quote Investigator shows the credit to Confucius first appears around 1831, in The Royal Lady’s Magazine — roughly 70 years after Goldsmith wrote it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson misattributed

An 1900 anthology, Gems of Literature, reassigned the saying to Emerson; there is no basis for this in his works, per QI.

Vince Lombardi & Nelson Mandela quoted, not authored

Both are recorded using the adage in the 20th century (Lombardi via Bart Starr in 1969; Mandela at a 1998 White House reception), which spread it further — but neither originated it, as QI documents.

The true author is Oliver Goldsmith, who wrote it in The Citizen of the World (1762).

Context

A quote designed to be mistaken

Goldsmith’s book is a satire: an imaginary Chinese philosopher, Lien Chi Altangi, writes home to describe the absurdities of London life. To make the device convincing, Goldsmith seasoned the letters with grave, aphoristic ‘Eastern’ wisdom — including this line about falling and rising.

The disguise worked too well. Readers took the maxims for real Chinese proverbs, and over the next century editors quietly swapped the fictional Lien Chi for the most famous real Chinese sage they knew: Confucius. It is a misattribution the author practically engineered.

The line only sounds like Confucius because Goldsmith built it to.

Explore

Filed under

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

Resilience Failure Hope

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.

Our Greatest Glory Is Not in Never Falling — full investigationquoteinvestigator.com

Traces the maxim to Goldsmith (1762) and documents the 1831 reassignment to Confucius, plus later Emerson/Lombardi/Mandela uses.

The Citizen of the World — primary textarchive.org

Digitized full text of Goldsmith's letters containing the exact sentence in Letter VII.

Oliver Goldsmith (Wikiquote)en.wikiquote.org

Sourced quotations page attributing the line to Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World.

Confucius (Wikiquote)en.wikiquote.org

Confucius quotations page; the falling/rising line is absent from his genuine sayings.

Oliver Goldsmith (Britannica)britannica.com

Biography of the Anglo-Irish author of The Citizen of the World, The Vicar of Wakefield and She Stoops to Conquer.

Not the sage — the satirist

The real author

Oliver Goldsmith

1728–1774 · Anglo-Irish poet, playwright & novelist

Oliver Goldsmith was an Anglo-Irish writer of the London literary circle around Samuel Johnson, celebrated for the novel The Vicar of Wakefield, the comedy She Stoops to Conquer and the poem The Deserted Village. In 1760–61 he published a series of satirical letters in The Public Ledger, written in the voice of an imaginary Chinese visitor to London; collected in 1762 as The Citizen of the World, they are the true home of this ‘Confucius’ maxim. He died in London in 1774.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The Citizen of the World (1762)

Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World; or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London, to His Friends in the East, Letter VII (London, 1762). Earliest documented use; reassigned to Confucius by 1831 (The Royal Lady's Magazine).

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall’?” Last verified 8 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/our-greatest-glory-is-not-in-never-falling-but-in-rising