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Who really said it

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience

Not Teilhard de Chardin — most likely Wayne Dyer Wayne Dyer 1940–2015 · American self-help author & motivational speaker
Disputed In copyright

The line is in none of Teilhard’s works, and he died in 1955. Quote Investigator’s earliest close match ↗ is Wayne Dyer, writing “A Letter to the Next Generation” in a Volkswagen advertising section of Time on 17 October 1988; the flat declarative version appears the following year on the back cover and in chapter two of his You’ll See It When You Believe It, attributed to nobody. QI calls Dyer “the most likely creator based on available evidence” and warns the ascription may shift — which is why this page says most likely rather than written by. One further wrinkle: Dyer wrote it in the second person (“You are not a human being…”). The “We…” form quoted today is the one Stephen Covey printed in 1989 — crediting Chardin.

Last verified 6 Oct 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience” not Teilhard de Chardin, who never wrote it and died in 1955. Quote Investigator's earliest close match is Wayne Dyer in a Time advertising section of 17 October 1988, with the declarative form in his You'll See It When You Believe It (William Morrow, 1989), back cover and p. 47, where he wrote it in the second person ("You are not a human being..."). The "We" form is Stephen Covey's, printed in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), p. 319, crediting Chardin without a citation. QI calls Dyer the most likely creator rather than a proven one. Traced by Quotle.info. · Verbatim: “You are not a human being having a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being having a human experience.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Wayne W. Dyer and William Morrow & Company (the 1989 publisher)). 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 Wayne Dyer — American self-help author & motivational speaker. Theme: "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience". 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 not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience". 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 1988 advertisement, and the 1989 book

Earliest close match
Time magazine — “A Letter to the Next Generation From Dr. Wayne W. Dyer”
Date
17 October 1988, volume 132, number 16, quote page 2 — a special advertising section for Volkswagen (verified on microfiche by Quote Investigator)
Earliest declarative form
Wayne W. Dyer, You’ll See It When You Believe It (William Morrow, 1989) — back cover, p. 16 and the chapter-two epigraph, p. 47
In Teilhard’s own works
Not found — he died in 1955 and researchers have located no instance

Can you see yourselves as spiritual beings having a human experience, rather than human beings who may be having a spiritual experience? Time, 17 October 1988 — the earliest known form

The oldest version located, as Quote Investigator transcribes it from microfiche ↗. Note that it is a question, and a second-person one, inside a magazine advertisement. Dyer went on to discuss his three-year-old daughter serving him invisible food on toy dishes — her love and her thoughts being real and unseeable — to argue that father and daughter were both spiritual beings. The polished declarative aphorism came a year later; the first-person-plural version people quote came from someone else entirely.

Quote Investigator: You Are Not a Human Being Having a Spiritual Experience

How the credit went to the wrong man

  • 1988 — QI’s earliest close match ↗: Dyer’s “A Letter to the Next Generation” in a Volkswagen advertising section of Time, 17 October 1988, quote page 2, verified on microfiche. It is phrased as a question.
  • 1989 — Dyer, declarative and uncredited. You’ll See It When You Believe It (William Morrow) lists it as the second of seven “universal principles that lead to your self-realization” on the back cover, and repeats it as the chapter-two epigraph: “You are not a human being having a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being having a human experience.” QI verified the book with scans ↗ and records that Dyer attributed the words to no one in either 1988 or 1989 — though he did credit an unrelated quotation about love to Teilhard de Chardin in the same book.
  • 1989 — Covey, and the error. In the same year, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Simon & Schuster, quote page 319) printed the first-person-plural form with the words “In the words of Teilhard de Chardin” — and gave no citation. QI verified that page with scans ↗. Covey repeated the Chardin credit in a 1992 interview in Training. Given the reach of that book, this is almost certainly where the misattribution became general.
  • 1991 — and someone got it right. Anthony Robbins, in Awaken the Giant Within (quote page 431), wrote that he had recently visited Wayne Dyer, who “said something that day that typifies my feelings” — and quoted the saying, crediting Dyer. Also verified by QI ↗. Robbins’s version is in the first person plural, which suggests Dyer was by then saying it that way aloud.
  • A third claimant. Moira Timms’s Beyond Prophecies and Predictions gave the line to the mystic Georges I. Gurdjieff, who died in 1949, as a chapter epigraph (quote page 62; 1994 per QI’s citation ↗, 1993 per Wikiquote ↗). No source is given for that either. Wikiquote’s Teilhard page lists this exact wording under Disputed ↗, noting that the Chardin and Gurdjieff credits both appear in 1990s books and neither cites a source.
In copyright

Every documented appearance of this saying is modern and in copyright: the 1988 Time advertising section, Dyer’s 1989 You’ll See It When You Believe It (William Morrow), and Covey’s 1989 The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Simon & Schuster). Nothing here is public-domain text, and attaching Teilhard’s name does not make it so — he never wrote it, and his own works published from 1955 onward are themselves in copyright. Quote it as a short excerpt credited to Dyer.

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 names, and none of them wrote it down

This may be the most-shared spiritual aphorism on the internet, and it is credited almost everywhere to a French Jesuit who never wrote it. Two other dead men have been handed it as well. In every case the credit arrives without a citation.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) Not in his works

Quote Investigator reports that researchers have not found this quotation in Teilhard’s works ↗, and he died in April 1955 ↗. Wikiquote files it under Disputed on his own page ↗, recording that the earliest Chardin credits it can find are 1990s books — Robert J. Furey’s The Joy of Kindness (1993), p. 138, among them — none of which cite a source.

Stephen R. Covey Popularizer of the error

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), p. 319, introduces the line with “In the words of Teilhard de Chardin” and cites nothing; QI verified the page, and the repeat in a 1992 Training interview ↗. The 7 Habits is Covey’s most popular book, and Time named him one of the 25 most influential people in 1996 ↗, which is how an uncited epigraph becomes a fact everybody knows.

Georges I. Gurdjieff (died 1949) Unsupported

Moira Timms’s Beyond Prophecies and Predictions used the saying as a chapter epigraph credited to Gurdjieff, at quote page 62 — dated 1994 by QI ↗ and 1993 by Wikiquote ↗. Neither source offers a citation, and Gurdjieff died in 1949, nearly four decades before the earliest located instance.

“We…” versus “You…” Person shifted

Dyer’s documented sentence is second person: “You are not a human being having a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being having a human experience” — back cover and chapter-two epigraph of the 1989 book, verified with scans ↗. The “We…” form at the top of this page is the one Covey printed, and it is the form that travelled. A line addressed to the reader became a line about all of us, and changed owners on the way.

Dyer himself Not proven

QI calls Dyer “the most likely creator based on available evidence” and adds that “this ascription may shift if new illuminating citations are uncovered.” Wikiquote, meanwhile, says Dyer “often quotes it in his presentations, crediting it to Chardin” ↗ — a claim it does not source, and one that sits awkwardly beside QI’s finding that he credited nobody in 1988 or 1989. Both can be true if he credited Chardin only later; we cannot confirm that he did.

Quote Investigator’s conclusion: Dyer used a version of the saying in 1988 and is the most likely creator, while “Stephen R. Covey attributed the saying to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, but there is no substantive support for his claim at this time.” ↗

Context

An advertisement, a book cover, and a bestseller

The route this sentence took is unusually well documented, and unusually modern. It begins in a car advertisement — Volkswagen bought a section of Time in October 1988 and invited a bestselling self-help author to write a letter to the future — and it ends on a million office bookshelves, over the name of a Jesuit palaeontologist who had been dead for thirty-four years.

Teilhard was the perfect host for it. A priest and scientist who tried to fold evolution into Christian mysticism ↗, he wrote about the noosphere and the Omega Point and was formally warned about by the Holy Office in 1962. A line about being spiritual beings in human form sounds exactly like him, which is the whole mechanism: attributions do not drift at random, they drift toward whoever the sentiment fits. Dyer, who very likely wrote it, was still alive and publishing when the credit went elsewhere.

“Can you see yourselves as spiritual beings having a human experience…?”

What Dyer actually wrote in 1988

The Time text is a rhetorical question addressed to people of the future: “Can you see yourselves as spiritual beings having a human experience, rather than human beings who may be having a spiritual experience?” The antimetabole — the reversal that makes the line memorable — is already there, but it is still a question rather than a claim.

A year later the question has become the second of seven principles on the back cover of You’ll See It When You Believe It, under the single word THOUGHT, and it repeats as the epigraph to chapter two. That is a writer promoting his own formulation to a slogan, and he attached no one else’s name to it.

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Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: You Are Not a Human Being Having a Spiritual Experiencequoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: the 1988 Time advertisement verified on microfiche, Dyer’s 1989 book verified with scans, Covey’s 1989 Chardin credit, Robbins’s 1991 Dyer credit, the Gurdjieff claim, and the conclusion that Dyer is the most likely creator.
Wikiquote: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — Disputeden.wikiquote.org

Teilhard’s quotation page lists this exact first-person-plural wording under Disputed, recording the 1993 Furey and Timms attributions, the Gurdjieff rival credit, and that neither cites a source.
Wikipedia: Pierre Teilhard de Chardinen.wikipedia.org

The man it is credited to: 1 May 1881 – 10 April 1955, French Jesuit priest and palaeontologist, part of the Peking Man discovery, originator of the Omega Point and a contributor to the noosphere concept.
Wikipedia: Wayne Dyeren.wikipedia.org

The likely author: 10 May 1940 – 29 August 2015, Ed.D. from Wayne State in 1970, author of Your Erroneous Zones (1976) and twenty more best-sellers, with later work turning toward spirituality.
Wikipedia: Stephen Coveyen.wikipedia.org

The man who spread the Chardin credit: 24 October 1932 – 16 July 2012, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, named by Time one of the 25 most influential people in 1996.

The likely author

About Wayne Dyer

Wayne Dyer

1940–2015 · American self-help author & motivational speaker

Wayne Walter Dyer took a bachelor’s degree in history and philosophy, a master’s in psychology and an Ed.D. in guidance and counselling from Wayne State University in 1970. He was a high-school guidance counsellor and then a therapist in private practice before a literary agent approached him at St John’s University about putting his ideas into a book: Your Erroneous Zones (1976) made him a fixture of American self-help, and twenty more best-sellers and a long run of PBS specials followed. Influenced early by Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis, his later work turned toward spirituality — which is the territory this saying occupies. He was alive and publishing for twenty-six years after the credit for it went to someone else.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented appearance

Wayne W. Dyer, “A Letter to the Next Generation From Dr. Wayne W. Dyer,” Time 132, no. 16 (17 October 1988), special advertising section for Volkswagen, 2 — the earliest close match, phrased as a question. The declarative second-person form appears in Wayne W. Dyer, You’ll See It When You Believe It (New York: William Morrow, 1989), back cover, 16 and 47. The first-person-plural form quoted today appears in Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 319, credited there to Teilhard de Chardin without citation. Dates, pages and transcriptions per Quote Investigator, 20 June 2019, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/06/20/spiritual/.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience’?” Last verified 6 Oct 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/we-are-not-human-beings-having-a-spiritual-experience-we/

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