The closing clause belongs to Leonard Cohen, from “Anthem” on his 1992 album The Future; the opening echoes Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), whose actual sentence reads “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Quote Investigator ↗ found no evidence that anyone — Hemingway, Cohen or Rumi — wrote the combined sentence; the earliest instance it documents is a tweet of 8 June 2013 crediting Hemingway.
“We are all broken. That's how the light gets in” Not Rumi. "We are all broken. That's how the light gets in" is a modern composite: the opening echoes Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929, ch. 34) and the closing clause is Leonard Cohen's, from "Anthem" on The Future (1992). The earliest instance documented by Quote Investigator is a tweet of 8 June 2013, credited to Hemingway. — Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Rumi. Use the credit shown above instead.
Can you use it?
? We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the themes of resilience, hope and humility. Theme: "We are all broken. That's how the light gets in". 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 "We are all broken. That's how the light gets in". 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 nearest genuine text
Nearest genuine source
A Farewell to Arms
First published
Serialized in Scribner’s Magazine, May–October 1929; published in book form by Scribner in September 1929
Second half
Leonard Cohen, “Anthem,” on The Future (1992)
Earliest instance of the composite
A tweet of 8 June 2013 crediting Hemingway, per Quote Investigator
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.
A Farewell to Arms, ch. 34
This is the closest real sentence by any of the three named authors — and it is not consoling. Hemingway offers no light through the break, only survival for some and death for the rest. The quotable version reverses the mood, which is a good sign that it was assembled by someone else.
1841 — the oldest ancestor Quote Investigator identifies ↗ is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Compensation,” whose text reads “There is a crack in every thing God has made” (full essay on Wikisource ↗). In context it is a warning, not a comfort.
1929 — Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, ch. 34: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills” (sourced on Wikiquote ↗). The novel was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine from May to October 1929 and published in book form that September ↗.
1992 — Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem,” on The Future ↗, gives the closing clause its exact wording.
2013–2016 — the composite surfaces: Quote Investigator’s earliest instance ↗ is a tweet of 8 June 2013 signed with Hemingway’s name, and it reaches print by 8 May 2016 in the Lansing State Journal.
No rights status can honestly be asserted for this sentence: it has no identified author and no first publication — the earliest instance documented is an anonymous 2013 tweet. For the parts, the picture differs: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, first published in 1929, is in the public domain in the United States, while Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” (1992) is firmly in copyright and should not be reproduced as lyrics.
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
Three famous names, none of them the author
This sentence is a magnet: it has been hung on a novelist, a songwriter and a 13th-century Persian poet, and the research says none of them wrote it in this form.
✕
The whole sentenceErnest Hemingway Fabricated
The dominant credit online, and the one Quote Investigator ↗ tested: it concludes the quotation was not crafted by Hemingway and finds nothing earlier than a tweet of 8 June 2013 carrying his name. Goodreads ↗ still lists it under Hemingway — while tagging it misattributed-ernest-hemingway.
✕
The whole sentenceRumi By association
Rumi gets pulled in through Coleman Barks’s 1995 version of “Childhood Friends,” which ends by telling the reader to keep looking at the bandaged place because that is where the light enters — a different image, in a modern English rendering. Quote Investigator files this investigation under Rumi ↗ for exactly that reason, and identifies no Rumi text as the source of the sentence.
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The second half onlyLeonard Cohen Half true
“That’s how the light gets in” really is Cohen’s, from “Anthem” on the 1992 album The Future ↗. The first half is not: his refrain is about a crack in everything, not about all of us being broken. Goodreads tags the composite misattributed-leonard-cohen as well.
✓Quote Investigator’s conclusion ↗: the quotation was not crafted by Hemingway, its exact genesis is uncertain, and Hemingway’s 1929 statement plus Cohen’s 1992 lyric both strongly influenced how the expression — and its ascription — evolved.
Context
How a consolation was assembled out of two other people’s sentences
Every part of this line has a real ancestor, and none of them says what the line says. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Compensation” carries the sentence “There is a crack in every thing God has made” — a warning that nothing in nature comes free, not a comfort. Hemingway’s version in A Farewell to Arms is bleaker still: the world breaks everyone, some are stronger afterwards, and the ones who will not break are killed. Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” supplied the consoling turn — the crack as the way in for light — and that is the half that survives verbatim.
What the internet did was cut the grimness off Hemingway’s clause, weld it to Cohen’s, and hand the result to whichever famous name suited the reader: Hemingway first, from 2013, and Rumi later, by way of a Coleman Barks rendering about a bandaged place that light enters. The mash-up is more quotable than any of its sources, which is exactly why it spread and why none of its supposed authors ever wrote it.
Hemingway said the world breaks you and kills the unbreakable. That is not a fridge magnet, so someone built one.
The chain of precursors Quote Investigator documents
1841 — Emerson’s “Compensation”: “There is a crack in every thing God has made.” 1860 — Benjamin Blood’s Optimism: The Lesson of Ages joins Emerson’s crack to light coming through it. 1929 — Hemingway’s broken places. 1992 — Cohen’s “Anthem.” 1995 — Coleman Barks’s version of Rumi’s “Childhood Friends,” which ends on a bandaged place where light enters. All five are documented on Quote Investigator ↗.
By 8 May 2016 the composite had made it off social media and into print: Quote Investigator cites it that day in the Lansing State Journal, printed as a Lansing Catholic High School student’s favourite quotation.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1934–2016 · Canadian singer-songwriter, poet and novelist
Leonard Cohen was a novelist and poet before he was a recording artist, and he worked slowly: Anthem, the song on his 1992 album The Future whose refrain pairs a crack in everything with the light that comes through it, took him about a decade to finish. That refrain is the one genuinely authored piece of this internet sentence — the second half. The first half, “We are all broken”, is not his, and the two-part line as it circulates appears nowhere in his work.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Composite — no single source work
Nearest genuine sources: Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (Scribner, 1929), ch. 34; and Leonard Cohen, “Anthem,” on The Future (1992), which supplies the closing clause. The earliest instance of the combined sentence documented by Quote Investigator is a tweet dated 8 June 2013, ascribed to Hemingway.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘We are all broken. That's how the light gets in’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/we-are-all-broken-thats-how-the-light-gets-in/