Who really said it

There are three sorts of people: the living, the dead, and those at sea

Q: Did Aristotle say "There are three sorts of people: the living, the dead, and those at sea"?

No. The line is genuinely ancient, but it belongs to Anacharsis, not Aristotle. It is preserved by Diogenes Laërtius in the Lives of the Eminent Philosophers: asked whether the living or the dead were more numerous, Anacharsis answered with a question — 'Under which head do you class those who are at sea?' Note what the modern version does to it. The original is a needle: a refusal to accept the terms of the question. The famous rewrite flattens it into a tidy statement of three categories, loses the joke, and hands it to a more famous Greek.

Not Aristotle — it is Anacharsis, and it is a question Anacharsis fl. 6th century BC · Scythian sage, remembered among the wise men of Greece

Real, ancient, and by the wrong man. Free to reuse

The line is genuinely ancient, but it belongs to Anacharsis, not Aristotle. It is preserved by Diogenes Laërtius in the Lives of the Eminent Philosophers: asked whether the living or the dead were more numerous, Anacharsis answered with a question — ‘Under which head do you class those who are at sea?’ Note what the modern version does to it. The original is a needle: a refusal to accept the terms of the question. The famous rewrite flattens it into a tidy statement of three categories, loses the joke, and hands it to a more famous Greek.

Last verified 21 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“There are three sorts of people: the living, the dead, and those at sea” Not Aristotle. The saying is Anacharsis', recorded in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers I, 'Anacharsis' 5 (trans. C. D. Yonge, 1853), where it is a counter-question: "Under which head do you class those who are at sea?" Via Quotle.info

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Provenance

The source

Document: Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers
Speaker: Anacharsis, the Scythian
Reference: Book I, ‘Anacharsis’, sect. 5 — trans. C. D. Yonge, 1853
Aristotle source: None — not in the surviving Aristotelian corpus

Under which head do you class those who are at sea? Diogenes Laërtius I, 'Anacharsis' 5 (trans. C. D. Yonge, 1853)

Anacharsis’ actual reply, in Yonge’s Victorian English. He had been asked a binary question — living or dead, which are there more of — and instead of answering he pointed at the men on the water, who are, in the only sense that matters to their families, neither.

Anacharsis — the sourced saying with its Diogenes Laërtius reference

How we traced it

The genuine text is in Diogenes Laërtius, the third-century AD compiler who collected the philosophers’ sayings and comebacks. In the section on Anacharsis, he records that the sage was asked whether the dead or the living were more numerous, and replied by asking where sailors belong. The English above is C. D. Yonge’s 1853 translation the sourced text ↗.
The Aristotle credit has no document behind it. Nothing resembling the line appears in the surviving Aristotelian corpus, and the treatises are among the most thoroughly indexed bodies of text in existence — an unlocated Aristotle sentence is a strong signal that there is no Aristotle sentence.
The Plato version fails too. The line is regularly hunted for in the Critias and the Timaeus, presumably because both dialogues concern the sea and Atlantis. It is in neither. Anacharsis, meanwhile, has the saying under his own name in a standard reference work, which is about as clean as ancient attribution gets.

Public domain

Both layers are free to use. Diogenes Laërtius wrote in the third century AD, and C. D. Yonge’s English translation was published in 1853 — both long out of copyright worldwide. The modern reworded version at the top of this page has no identified author, so we make no claim about it; quote the Yonge line if you want something you can stand behind. This is not legal advice.

Fact-check

The attribution problem

This one is unusual and rather satisfying: the quotation is genuinely ancient, the real speaker is known and sourced, and the only things wrong with the popular version are the name on it and the fact that it has stopped being a joke.

Not Aristotle no source in the corpus

Nothing like it survives in the Aristotelian treatises, which are exhaustively indexed. Yet the credit has enough momentum that it has needed correcting in the pages of academic journals the published correction ↗.

Anacharsis, the Scythian sourced

Diogenes Laërtius records it in his section on Anacharsis: asked whether the living or the dead were more numerous, he asked in return where you would put those at sea the sourced text ↗.

Not in the Critias or the Timaeus searched and absent

The two dialogues most often named are the two most concerned with the sea, which is likely why people go looking there. It is in neither — nor anywhere else in Plato.

Occasionally offered unsupported

You will see the line dated to 45 BC and given to Cicero. No passage has ever been produced, and the attribution appears only in modern quotation collections.

A modern flattening form changed

Anacharsis asked a question that refuses the premise; the modern version answers it with a tidy list of three categories. The rewrite is what makes it quotable and also what kills the point — the whole force of the original is that he will not tell you the answer.

Anacharsis the Scythian, recorded in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers I, ‘Anacharsis’ 5 — and in the original it is a counter-question, not a classification the source ↗.

Context

Why it resonates

For anyone who has waited on shore for a ship, the line is not a paradox but a description. A sailor at sea is not dead, but he is not present either — and for months at a time nobody on land can tell you which of the two he is. That is why it has been quoted for centuries by seafaring people and printed in maritime journals.

It carries better as a question than as a statement. Anacharsis was not proposing a third category of human being; he was pointing out that the question he had been asked could not be answered honestly, which is a very different and much sharper move.

He was not naming a third kind of person. He was refusing to answer the question.

Who Anacharsis was

A Scythian, from the steppe north of the Black Sea — a foreigner among Greeks, which is the whole basis of his reputation.

He was remembered for blunt outsider’s questions that exposed what the Greeks took for granted, and some ancient lists count him among the wise men of Greece.

Almost nothing survives of him directly. What we have comes through later compilers, chiefly Diogenes Laërtius.

That is also why his name loses out to Aristotle’s: a good line attached to an unfamiliar name tends to migrate to a famous one.

Explore

Filed under

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

Mortality Courage

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.

Anacharsis — sourced quotationsen.wikiquote.org

Carries the saying with its Diogenes Laërtius reference and names Yonge as the translator.

Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Philosopherstopostext.org

The full text of the compilation in which the Anacharsis section sits — search it yourself.

Anacharsisen.wikipedia.org

Who he was: a Scythian outsider whose blunt questions made him a byword for plain wisdom in Greece.

'There are three sorts of people' (Aristotle) — a correction in the literaturepubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

A published exchange in a medical journal correcting the Aristotle credit — evidence of how far the misattribution reaches.

Popularly credited author

Why it gets pinned on Aristotle

Aristotle

384–322 BC · Greek philosopher

Aristotle is the default name for any ancient-sounding line that classifies things, because classifying things is genuinely what he did — he sorted animals, arguments, governments and virtues into categories for a living. A sentence that opens ‘there are three sorts of people’ therefore sounds like him before you have read the rest of it. That is precisely the trap: the modern rewrite was made to sound Aristotelian by turning Anacharsis’ question into a taxonomy, and the disguise worked.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Anacharsis, quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Book I, ‘Anacharsis’, sect. 5; trans. C. D. Yonge (London, 1853).

MLA (9th ed.)

Anacharsis. Quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, translated by C. D. Yonge, 1853, Book I, ‘Anacharsis’ 5.

APA (7th ed.)

Diogenes Laërtius. (1853). The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (C. D. Yonge, Trans.), Book I, ‘Anacharsis’ 5. (Original work 3rd century AD)

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘There are three sorts of people: the living, the dead, and those at sea’?” Last verified 21 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/there-are-three-sorts-of-people-the-living-the-dead