Disputed & Misattributed Quotes
Quote collections online are full of misattribution — lines that were never said by the person they're pinned to, or paraphrases loose enough that no single source can be pointed to. Most sites either don't check or quietly drop these. We'd rather keep them, labelled, with an explanation of what's actually known. That is the whole point of citing a real source for the rest of the collection: it only means something if the ones that fail the check are shown too.
4 quotes currently flagged.
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Misattributed
"The mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size."
Commonly attributed to Albert Einstein, but this phrasing traces to Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who wrote in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (The Atlantic, September 1858): 'Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.' The Einstein attribution first appears on Usenet in 1998, 140 years later, with no supporting source.
Actually said by: Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
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Misattributed
"Death smiles at us all; all we can do is smile back."
Not found in Meditations or any other work of Marcus Aurelius. The line is dialogue written for the character Maximus in the film Gladiator (2000), where it is attributed on-screen to Marcus Aurelius. The nearest genuine passage is the closing line of Meditations (Long's translation, Book 12): 'thou must depart from among men... in kindly spirit towards those who drive thee away.'
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Disputed
"You have power over your mind - not external events. Realize this, and you will find strength."
A widely circulated modern paraphrase. No sentence matching this wording appears in Long's or any other faithful English translation of Meditations. It compresses ideas found across several passages (e.g. Meditations 6.8, 9.13 in Long's translation) into a slogan-like form that isn't a direct quotation of any one of them.
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Disputed
"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."
This wording closely tracks Gregory Hays's 2002 translation of Meditations, which is still under copyright and is not quoted on this site. No matching sentence appears in the public-domain Long translation. Flagged for replacement with Long's or Casaubon's wording once the corresponding passage is identified, rather than for misattribution of authorship.