The thought is Nietzsche’s, from aphorism 126 — headed “Forgetfulness” — of Morgenröthe (1881), the book published in English as The Dawn of Day or Daybreak. The familiar English wording, though, matches neither of the two English translations Quote Investigator sets against it — J. M. Kennedy’s 1911 version and a 1997 Cambridge rendering: it is the form printed in W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger’s The Viking Book of Aphorisms (1966) and credited there to Nietzsche. Thomas De Quincey wrote a different sentence on the same theme in 1821, which is almost certainly why his name gets attached.
“The Existence of Forgetting Has Never Been Proved” Friedrich Nietzsche, not Thomas De Quincey. The thought is aphorism 126, "Forgetfulness," of Morgenröthe (1881), published in English as The Dawn of Day; J. M. Kennedy's 1911 translation reads "It has never yet been proved that there is such a thing as forgetfulness: all that we know is that we have no power over recollection." The familiar English wording above matches neither the 1911 Kennedy translation nor the 1997 Cambridge rendering Quote Investigator sets beside it — it is the form printed in W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger's The Viking Book of Aphorisms (Viking Press, 1966), p. 361, and credited there to Nietzsche. De Quincey's own line, from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), is different: "there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind." · Verbatim: “The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to mind when we want them.”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Thomas De Quincey. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Provenance
The Dawn of Day, aphorism 126
Work
Morgenröthe: Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile — in English, The Dawn of Day (later Daybreak)
Section
Aphorism 126, headed “Forgetfulness”
First published
1881, in German
Translation
J. M. Kennedy, 1911 (quoted below) — the popular English wording matches neither Kennedy nor the 1997 Cambridge rendering
Forgetfulness.—It has never yet been proved that there is such a thing as forgetfulness: all that we know is that we have no power over recollection. In the meantime we have filled up this gap in our power with the word “forgetfulness,” exactly as if it were another faculty added to our list. But, after all, what is within our power? If that word fills up a gap in our power, might not the other words be found capable of filling up a gap in the knowledge which we possess of our power?
The Dawn of Day, p. 131
That is the complete aphorism as J. M. Kennedy rendered it in 1911, on page 131. The version that circulates today — “the existence of forgetting has never been proved” — compresses the first clause and drops the rest, and its phrasing comes from a 1966 anthology rather than from Kennedy or from the 1997 Cambridge rendering Quote Investigator sets beside him. (Those are the two translations QI compares; we have not checked every English translation of the book.)
1821 — Thomas De Quincey publishes Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in The London Magazine, containing a different sentence on the same theme: “there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind.” It is reprinted for decades and widely quoted — full text at Project Gutenberg ↗.
1881 — Nietzsche publishes Morgenröthe. Aphorism 126, headed “Forgetfulness,” makes the argument the modern quotation compresses; J. M. Kennedy’s 1911 translation renders it on page 131 — read it at Project Gutenberg ↗.
1960–1966 — the modern phrasing surfaces. Milon Brown’s Effective Work Management (1960) invokes Nietzsche without quotation marks; Auden and Kronenberger’s The Viking Book of Aphorisms (1966) prints the near-exact line, credited to Nietzsche — Quote Investigator’s citations ↗.
1967–1984 — the anthology wording spreads: an unattributed filler item in Texas’s Winters Enterprise (1967), a Nietzsche credit in The Kansas City Star (1972), and an epigraph to the memory chapter of a 1984 psychology textbook — all documented by QI ↗.
Two different things are in play here. Nietzsche’s German original (1881) and J. M. Kennedy’s translation (1911) are both long in the public domain in the United States, and the excerpt above is quoted from Kennedy. The popular English wording is not: its earliest documented near-exact appearance is the entry in The Viking Book of Aphorisms (Viking Press, 1966), so we treat that specific rendering conservatively as in copyright rather than assume it descends from a pre-1931 translation.
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
Where the De Quincey credit comes from
Two writers phrased an idea about forgetting memorably, sixty years and one language apart, and the two sentences have been quietly merging ever since.
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The whole quotationThomas De Quincey Conflation
De Quincey did write about forgetting, and the line is famous — but it is a different sentence: “Of this at least I feel assured, that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind,” from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), readable in full at Project Gutenberg ↗. Quote Investigator calls it a thematic precursor, not the source.
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The exact English wordingthe 1911 or 1997 translations Quote Investigator compares Anthology phrasing
Neither translation QI prints reads this way. Kennedy’s 1911 version has “forgetfulness” and “no power over recollection”; a 1997 Cambridge University Press rendering has “the act of recollection does not lie within our power.” The familiar wording is the entry printed in the 1966 Viking Book of Aphorisms, per Quote Investigator’s citations ↗.
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OccasionallyW. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger Compilers, not authors
They compiled the 1966 anthology in which the modern wording first appears in near-exact form, and they credited it to Nietzsche — but a compiler’s name on the spine is not an author’s name on the line. QI lists both men among the candidate attributions ↗.
✓The idea and the sentence are Nietzsche’s, from aphorism 126 of Morgenröthe (1881) — confirmed in the 1911 translation ↗. De Quincey’s line is his own, and it is not this one.
Context
Why the two lines keep collapsing into one
Nietzsche’s point in aphorism 126 is not really about memory — it is about vocabulary. We have no reliable command over recollection, he argues, and rather than admit the gap in our powers we drop a noun into it, “forgetfulness,” and then treat the noun as though it named a faculty we possess. The closing question turns the knife: if one word papers over a hole in our power, how many other words are papering over holes in what we know about our power?
De Quincey had reached a neighbouring idea from the opposite direction in 1821, under opium, convinced that nothing is ever truly erased and that a veil merely falls between us and “the secret inscriptions on the mind.” Both lines say something like forgetting is not what you think it is, both are short, and both are endlessly reprinted — which is a reliable recipe for one man’s sentence ending up under the other man’s name. The modern psychology of memory made the collision worse: the anthology wording was used as the epigraph to the memory chapter of a 1984 psychology textbook, and it now circulates in exactly the contexts where the retrieval-failure reading is being argued.
we have filled up this gap in our power with the word “forgetfulness”
How the wording drifted
1911, J. M. Kennedy’s translation: “It has never yet been proved that there is such a thing as forgetfulness: all that we know is that we have no power over recollection.”
1997, a Cambridge University Press rendering: “It has not yet been proved that there is any such thing as forgetting; all we know is that the act of recollection does not lie within our power.”
1966, The Viking Book of Aphorisms: “The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to.” — the version everyone now quotes, minus the “our” and the trailing “to.”
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1844–1900 · German philosopher & classical philologist
Nietzsche was a German philosopher and writer who began his career as a classical philologist, taking a chair at Basel while still in his twenties before ill health drove him out of academic life. Morgenröthe (1881) — The Dawn of Day, later Daybreak — is the book in which he said he opened his campaign against morality, and it is built from more than five hundred short numbered sections rather than continuous argument. That aphoristic form is exactly why lines like this one travel so easily: each section is already quotable, already detached from its surroundings.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day, trans. J. M. Kennedy, vol. 9 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1911), sec. 126, p. 131. The popular English wording follows the entry credited to Nietzsche in W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger, comps., The Viking Book of Aphorisms: A Personal Selection (New York: Viking Press, 1966), p. 361.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The Existence of Forgetting Has Never Been Proved’?” Last verified 8 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-existence-of-forgetting-has-never-been-proved/