You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you
Written byDale Carnegie1888–1955 · American writer & lecturer
This one is genuine, and word-for-word. It is on page 76 of How to Win Friends and Influence People, Part Two (“Six Ways to Make People Like You”), Chapter 1 — and Carnegie says it twice in a row, the second time in exactly the wording that circulates today (1943 Bombay printing, Internet Archive ↗).
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you” Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), Part Two, Chapter 1 — verified in the book
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Provenance
The real source
Work
How to Win Friends and Influence People
Author
Dale Carnegie
First published
October 1936 · Simon & Schuster, New York
Location
Part Two (“Six Ways to Make People Like You”), Ch. 1 — p. 76 in the 1943 Bombay printing
You never read a book on psychology, Tippy. You didn’t need to. You knew by some divine instinct that one can make more friends in two months by becoming genuinely interested in other people than one can in two years by trying to get other people interested in him. Let me repeat that. You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
Part Two, Chapter 1 · p. 76
Carnegie is addressing Tippy, the puppy of his childhood, a few lines after describing the dog’s death. The Internet Archive copy is machine-read from a 1943 scan and garbles a few characters in the second sentence; the wording given here is the standard reading, and the first sentence — with “genuinely” — is legible as printed.
The sentence is printed on p. 76 of the eleventh Indian edition (Bombay: D. B. Taraporevala Sons & Co., 1943), in Part Two, Chapter 1, “Do This and You’ll Be Welcome Anywhere” — full scan at the Internet Archive ↗. That printing predates the 1981 revised edition.
Wikipedia ↗ dates first publication to October 1936 by Simon & Schuster and gives the chapter’s principle as “Become genuinely interested in other people.”
Wikiquote ↗ carries the line in its sourced section for the book, in a shortened form cited to p. 52 of a 1998 edition.
How to Win Friends and Influence People was first published in October 1936 by Simon & Schuster, so in the United States the text remains under copyright (works published 1931–1977 run 95 years from publication). The 1943 Bombay printing linked here is a freely readable scan of that same in-copyright text, not a public-domain work.
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
The credit is right — the wording drifts
For once, a famous name actually said it. What travels instead is the wording: Carnegie wrote the sentence twice on one page, and quotation collections have since produced further condensations of both.
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Reference works and quote sitesDale Carnegie Shortened variant
A compressed form — “You can make more friends in two months by being interested in them, than in two years by making them interested in you” — is what appears in the sourced section of his Wikiquote page ↗, cited there to p. 52 of a 1998 edition. It is markedly tighter than the sentence printed in the book.
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The “genuinely” versionDale Carnegie Variant wording
Some quotations insert “genuinely” — “by becoming genuinely interested in other people.” That matches Carnegie’s first, third-person pass at the sentence on the same page, and it is the wording of the chapter’s stated principle, “Become genuinely interested in other people” (Wikipedia ↗). The popular sentence is his second pass, which drops the adverb.
The most-quoted sentence in Carnegie’s book is addressed to a puppy. The chapter opens by asking why you would read a book about winning friends when you could instead study “the greatest winner of friends the world has ever known” — the dog who wags his tail at you from ten feet away with no real estate to sell. Carnegie then recalls Tippy, the fifty-cent yellow-haired pup his father bought when he was five, killed by lightning within ten feet of him one night, and tells him: you never read a book on psychology, and you didn’t need to.
The line lands its point immediately afterward with a piece of period data Carnegie loved: the New York Telephone Company studied 500 telephone conversations to find the most frequently used word, and it was “I.” The principle this chapter carries is the first of the six — “Become genuinely interested in other people” (Wikipedia ↗).
You never read a book on psychology, Tippy. You didn’t need to.
Read the full story
Carnegie wrote the sentence twice on the same page, and the repetition is deliberate: the first pass is third-person and includes the word “genuinely,” the second drops it and switches to “you.” Quote collections almost always take the second version, which is why the familiar wording lacks the adverb that Carnegie made the chapter’s actual principle.
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1888–1955 · American writer & public-speaking teacher
Dale Carnegie was born in Maryville, Missouri in 1888 and talked a YMCA manager into letting him teach a public-speaking class for a cut of the takings — the seed of the Dale Carnegie Course. His 1936 book How to Win Friends and Influence People turned that classroom material into one of the best-selling self-improvement books ever written; by his death in 1955 it had sold some five million copies in 31 languages. He wrote plainly and repeated himself on purpose, which is exactly why so many of his sentences survive as free-floating quotations.
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Cite this
Primary source
Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936), Part Two, chap. 1, “Do This and You’ll Be Welcome Anywhere”; wording verified at p. 76 of the eleventh Indian edition (Bombay: D. B. Taraporevala Sons & Co., 1943).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you’?” Last verified 25 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/you-can-make-more-friends-in-two-months-by-becoming/