Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

The more difficult the victory, the greater the happiness in winning

Written by Pelé 23 October 1940 – 29 December 2022 · Brazilian footballer
Verified as Pelé’s own writing — located in the primary source — with one caveat: the memoir says “a victory” where the circulating version says “the victory.” In copyright

Pelé wrote the sentence in his 1977 autobiography, My Life and the Beautiful Game (with Robert L. Fish, Doubleday), in a passage about a World Cup match — but the book reads “the more difficult a victory,” not “the victory.” The line the internet prints is his, with one word swapped.

Last verified 27 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Verified quote & credit

“The more difficult the victory, the greater the happiness in winning” Pelé, My Life and the Beautiful Game: The Autobiography of Pelé (with Robert L. Fish), Doubleday, 1977 — where the sentence reads "The more difficult a victory, the greater the happiness in winning." The widely circulated "the more difficult the victory" swaps one word. Verified by Quotle.info, 27 Jul 2026.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Edson Arantes do Nascimento (Pelé) and Robert L. Fish; Doubleday (1977 first edition) and Skyhorse Publishing (2007 reissue)). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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

In context

Evoking the world of Pelé — Brazilian footballer, named Athlete of the Century by the IOC in 1999. Theme: "The more difficult the victory, the greater the happiness in winning". 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 "The more difficult the victory, the greater the happiness in winning". 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 sentence, in the book that actually contains it

Source
My Life and the Beautiful Game: The Autobiography of Pelé
Written with
Robert L. Fish, listed in the catalogue record as joint author
First published
Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1977 (1st ed.); reissued by Skyhorse Publishing, 2007
As Pelé wrote it
“The more difficult a victory, the greater the happiness in winning.”

… our Selection, for it ensured our continuing in the World Cup games. The more difficult a victory, the greater the happiness in winning. After the game, back at the hotel, we read and heard on the radio … one word off

Reconstructed from four overlapping snippets returned by the Internet Archive’s full-text index of the scanned book; the same sentence is indexed in the 1977 Doubleday first edition and in the 2007 Skyhorse reissue. Both scans are lending-restricted, so no page number could be read — and none is claimed. Words are given as the OCR renders them (“Selection” is the book’s English rendering of Brazil’s Seleção).

Scanned first edition
View the 1977 Doubleday first edition at the Internet Archive
Full-text search hit inside Pelé's memoir (Open Library)

How the line travelled

In copyright

The sentence comes from My Life and the Beautiful Game, first published by Doubleday in 1977 — comfortably inside the term of US copyright, so the text is in copyright, not public domain. Quoting the single sentence with attribution is ordinary fair-use citation; reproducing the surrounding passage at length is not.

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.

Know a source that supports or challenges this? Add a link →

Paste a URL and we’ll check it. This doesn’t change the page — it goes to our review queue, and if it holds up we update the record with a citation.

Fact-check

Right man, wrong word — and the wrong book

This is not a stolen quote. Pelé wrote it. What travelled wrong is the wording and the sourcing — and both errors are now baked into the pages people cite.

“the more difficult the victory” altered

The memoir reads “The more difficult a victory, the greater the happiness in winning.” Sports anthologies of the early 1990s still printed “a victory”; by the time it reached the quote sites the article had hardened into “the.” Both forms are visible side by side in a single full-text search ↗.

Pelé: The Autobiography (2006) wrong book

Goodreads files the line under Pelé’s 2006 autobiography ↗. It belongs to the earlier memoir, My Life and the Beautiful Game (Doubleday, 1977), and it was already circulating in print in Howard E. Ferguson’s The Edge (1991) ↗, long before the 2006 book existed.

Wikiquote circular

English Wikiquote ↗ lists the altered wording in its general Quotes section with exactly one footnote — a link to Goodreads. A quote site citing a quote site is not a source, which is how a one-word error outlived the book it came from.

AZQuotes, QuoteFancy and the rest unsourced

AZQuotes ↗ reproduces the line with a name and no source at all — no book, no date, no page. The template that lets genuine quotations drift is the same one that lets fabricated ones spread.

Pelé did write it, in his own memoir in 1977 — and you can read the sentence in context in the Doubleday first edition ↗. Just quote it the way he wrote it: a victory.

Context

A memoir sentence, not a motivational slogan

On the quote sites this reads like a fortune-cookie aphorism — a standalone maxim about grit. In the book it is nothing of the kind. It sits mid-paragraph in Pelé’s first-person account of a World Cup match, right after he notes that a goal “ensured our continuing in the World Cup games,” and right before he describes going back to the team hotel and hearing the reaction on the radio. It is a man reflecting on a night he had just survived, not a coach handing out a slogan.

That context is also why the wording matters. “The more difficult a victory” is a working footballer talking about particular wins — this one, that one. “The more difficult the victory” flattens it into a general law. The version that conquered the internet is the flattened one.

The more difficult a victory, the greater the happiness in winning.

How the wording was traced

The line was located by running exact-phrase searches against the Internet Archive’s full-text book index through Open Library’s search-inside ↗. Searching the popular wording (“the more difficult the victory”) returns only quotation anthologies and self-help books — no Pelé title. Searching the memoir’s actual wording (“a victory”) returns the autobiography itself, in two separate scanned editions.

Both Internet Archive copies of the memoir are lending-restricted, so the page number could not be read from the scan; only the surrounding sentences are recoverable through the search index. For that reason no page citation is claimed here.

Quote Investigator has no article on this line, and English Wikiquote’s entry carries the altered wording with a single footnote pointing at Goodreads — which is how the mis-sourcing survived.

Explore

Filed under

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

Success Resilience Happiness

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.

Open Library — full-text search: "The more difficult a victory"openlibrary.org

The search that finds the sentence inside Pelé's own autobiography, in both scanned editions, alongside the anthologies that reprinted it.
My Life and the Beautiful Game (Doubleday, 1977) — first-edition scanarchive.org

The Internet Archive's scan of the Doubleday first edition of Pelé's autobiography — the primary source for the line.
Open Library catalogue record for the 1977 editionopenlibrary.org

Bibliographic record for the 1977 Doubleday first edition of Pelé's memoir.
Pelé — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Carries the altered "the victory" wording in its general Quotes section, footnoted only to Goodreads.
Goodreads quote pagewww.goodreads.com

The aggregator page that files the altered wording under the wrong Pelé book, and that Wikiquote cites.
Pat Mesiti, Attitudes and Altitudes (1997)archive.org

A 1997 leadership book that quotes Pelé using the altered "the more difficult the victory" form — the earliest instance of that wording found in this search.

The true author

Pelé really did write this one

Pelé

1940–2022 · Brazilian footballer, named Athlete of the Century by the IOC in 1999

Edson Arantes do Nascimento, universally known as Pelé, was a Brazilian forward widely regarded as one of the greatest players in the history of the game. Wikipedia records his 1,279 goals in 1,363 games as a Guinness World Record, and notes that he was named Athlete of the Century by the International Olympic Committee in 1999 and included in Time’s list of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. He told his own story in My Life and the Beautiful Game (Doubleday, 1977), written with the American novelist Robert L. Fish — the book in which this sentence actually appears.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Pelé (Edson Arantes do Nascimento), with Robert L. Fish. My Life and the Beautiful Game: The Autobiography of Pelé. 1st ed. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977. Sentence located by full-text search of the Internet Archive scans of the 1977 Doubleday first edition and the 2007 Skyhorse reissue, where it reads "The more difficult a victory, the greater the happiness in winning."

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The more difficult the victory, the greater the happiness in winning’?” Last verified 27 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-more-difficult-the-victory-the-greater-the-happiness-in/

Copied