Wisdom

Wisdom quotes attract misattribution like nothing else — a line sounds ancient, so it gets handed to Confucius, Buddha, or Lao Tzu regardless of who actually said it, or whether anyone did. A striking number of “ancient wisdom” quotes are, in fact, 20th-century inventions.I check these against real historical and textual sources where they exist, and I say clearly when a famous name is just a guess that stuck.