3 Quotes Zig Ziglar Never Actually Said

Zig Ziglar was a motivational speaking giant, which makes him a perfect target for quote misattribution. Famous, quotable people are magnets for this—if a saying sounds inspirational and you need a name to attach it to, why not pick someone who spent decades delivering exactly that kind of wisdom?

What makes Ziglar’s case particularly interesting is the pattern I kept finding: he’s getting credit for sayings that were already old when he was young. Two of the three quotes below were circulating in American newspapers decades before he was even born in 1926. The third comes from a 1982 book by someone else entirely, but it’s been pinned on Ziglar, C.S. Lewis, and at least two other people over the years.

This isn’t about Ziglar claiming credit he didn’t deserve—in at least one case, he himself credited the quote to someone else (who also didn’t say it). It’s about the internet’s habit of vacuuming up anonymous wisdom and slapping a famous name on it. Ziglar’s reputation as a success guru made him the perfect recipient. The actual sources? Anonymous newspaper filler from the 1900s, a self-help book from the Reagan era, and decades of telephone-game rewording.

“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

This one’s a mess. People attribute it to Zig Ziglar, C.S. Lewis, and at least two other names—Carl Bard and Maria Robinson—none of whom actually said it in this form. The real source is James R. Sherman’s 1982 book Rejection, where it appears as “You can’t go back and make a new start, but you can start right now and make a brand new ending.” The wording that circulates today is a later rewording, with the closest match showing up around 2003.

The C.S. Lewis attribution is pure fiction—it first appeared in 2017, fifty-four years after his death, and Lewis scholars confirm it’s nowhere in his actual works. Zig Ziglar himself quoted a version of this in 2000, but he credited someone named “Carl Bard,” who no one can identify. So Ziglar didn’t claim it as his own—he just passed along a misattribution, which then boomeranged back to him. Quote Investigator tracked down scans of the 1982 Sherman book, and the catalogs confirm it. That’s the earliest anyone’s found.

“There is no elevator to success, you have to take the stairs.”

This saying about elevators and stairs has been kicking around since 1905, when it appeared as anonymous filler in The Minneapolis Journal—twenty-one years before Zig Ziglar was born. The earliest version reads “If the elevator to success is stuck, try the stairs,” and it kept popping up in newspapers through the early 1900s. The Library of Congress full-text index has hits from 1907 in Yale, Michigan, and Wilmington, North Carolina. It was standard motivational newspaper boilerplate.

Modern quote sites credit Ziglar as if he coined it, which is impossible given the timeline. There’s also a separate trail leading to Joe Girard, a salesman who popularized the “elevator to success is out of order” variant in the 1970s. Both men helped keep the saying alive, but neither invented it. It’s one of those maxims that’s been scrubbed clean of its origins—anonymous, public-domain wisdom that the internet decided needed a famous author. Ziglar got the nod, probably because it sounds exactly like something he’d say.

“When we do more than we are paid to do, eventually we will be paid more for what we do.”

This one’s actually older than the elevator quote. The idea that doing more than you’re paid for will eventually get you paid more was already circulating in American newspapers by 1904. The Library of Congress has a hit from October 26, 1904, with the signature phrasing about being “paid for more than he does,” and dozens more anonymous printings followed through 1910. It was success-literature boilerplate before “success literature” was even a formal genre.

Napoleon Hill built an entire lesson around this maxim in his 1925 book The Law of Success—Lesson IX, “The Habit of Doing More Than Paid For.” Hill didn’t claim to have invented the saying; he just made it central to his teaching. Zig Ziglar came along later and reworded it into the version that circulates today: “When we do more than we are paid to do, eventually we will be paid more for what we do.” That’s the form quote sites attribute to him as the originator, ignoring both the newspaper record and Hill’s earlier work.

Here’s the pattern: take an old, anonymous saying that sounds good. Let it circulate for decades or a century. Then, once everyone’s forgotten where it came from, attribute it to whoever seems most plausible. Zig Ziglar sounds like the kind of guy who’d say these things, so he gets the credit—even when the record shows he was quoting other people, or when the sayings predate him by decades.

None of this diminishes Ziglar’s actual contributions. He said plenty of original, valuable things. But these three quotes aren’t among them. If a quote surprises you, or sounds almost too perfect, that’s your cue to check. The internet is full of beautiful sayings pinned to the wrong people. Sometimes the real author is forgotten. Sometimes they never signed their name in the first place.

Browse more of Zig Ziglar’s quotes — real and otherwise — in the full Zig Ziglar collection.