The 163-Year Chain Behind “We Cannot Direct the Wind”

Three names get attached to this quote, and they have almost nothing in common. A president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A country music icon from East Tennessee. A civil rights-era historian who founded a Black history museum in Omaha. Different decades, different professions, different audiences — and yet all three are routinely credited, individually and with total confidence, as the person who came up with a single sentence about wind and sails. That alone should be a tell. Real quotes don’t usually have three unrelated owners. Proverbs do.

I wanted to find out how a sentence ends up with three separate biographies attached to it, so I traced it back as far as the record goes — past all three names, past the 20th century entirely, to a trance lecture given by a spiritualist medium in 1859.

The Closest Thing to an Origin

In 1859, a young trance speaker named Cora L. V. Hatch was touring the American lecture circuit delivering talks she said came to her in altered states of consciousness — a fairly ordinary feature of the Spiritualist movement, which was enormously popular in mid-19th-century America and treated public lectures the way today’s internet treats viral threads. Somewhere in that circuit, a version of the wind-and-sails sentiment surfaces — not the modern wording, but recognizably the same idea: that you don’t control your circumstances, only your response to them. It’s the earliest thing Quote Investigator’s research turned up that resembles the saying, and it’s a precursor, not a match. Nobody was writing this down as a quotable line yet. It was just an idea in the air, the kind sermons and lecture circuits produce constantly and rarely credit to anyone specific.

The idea had to wait another 23 years to become an actual sentence someone put in print.

February 22, 1882: A Small Newspaper in Delaware

The earliest verified appearance of anything close to the modern wording is genuinely mundane: a small item in the Smyrna Times, a local paper in Smyrna, Delaware, on February 22, 1882. No byline, no fanfare, no claim of originality — just the line, printed as a piece of generic wisdom, the 19th-century newspaper equivalent of a filler quote at the bottom of a column: “though we cannot control the wind we can adjust the sails so as to profit by it.”

That’s the whole appearance. One paper, one page, one sentence, no author. It’s worth sitting with how ordinary that is. This wasn’t a famous person’s private notebook or a preserved letter. It was newspaper filler — the kind of thing an editor drops in because there’s a gap to fill and a decent proverb is cheap and reliable copy. Whoever wrote it almost certainly didn’t think they were coining anything. And for the next 116 years, nobody thought they needed to.

A Long Stretch of Belonging to No One

Here’s the part that’s easy to skip past: this sentence existed anonymously, doing exactly what it does now — getting quoted, printed, repeated, and found useful — for well over a century before anyone’s name got attached to it. That’s not a gap in the research. That’s the actual history. A piece of folk wisdom doesn’t need an author to keep circulating; it needs to be true enough, and portable enough, that people keep finding a reason to say it. This one clearly qualified. It just didn’t accumulate a name, the way most anonymous sayings don’t, until someone with a large enough audience said it and their audience assumed they’d made it up.

1998: Bertha Calloway

The first name Quote Investigator found attached to the saying is Bertha Calloway, the Omaha historian and founder of the Great Plains Black History Museum, in a 1998 book. There’s no indication Calloway claimed to have invented it — simply that a book credited her with it, which is a very different thing, and exactly the mechanism by which anonymous sayings acquire owners. Someone repeats a line in a context associated with a specific person, a compiler assumes that person is the source, and the byline sticks from then on in every subsequent list, poster, and calendar quote that copies from the first one instead of checking further back.

2006: Dolly Parton

Eight years later, a newspaper column credits the same line to Dolly Parton. Parton is, by reputation, exactly the kind of source people expect folksy, resilient wisdom from — which is precisely the problem. A quote that sounds like something Dolly Parton would say gets attributed to Dolly Parton whether or not she said it, because the attribution feels correct even when it isn’t verified. I found no interview, memoir, or documented statement where Parton herself used or claimed the line. The 2006 column appears to be doing the same thing Calloway’s 1998 book did: repeating a good sentence next to a recognizable name, and letting readers do the rest.

2012: Thomas S. Monson

The most recent, and probably most consequential, link in the chain: Thomas S. Monson, then president of the LDS Church, used the line in 2012 — without claiming to have coined it. But he said it to a very large, very attentive audience, in a context where his words are recorded, transcribed, and quoted specifically because he’s the one saying them. Quote Investigator’s research suggests this is the point where the modern Monson attribution really took hold: not because he claimed credit, but because saying something to enough people, in a setting where you’re the named speaker, is often enough to make a sentence yours in public memory — regardless of whether you said “I once heard” or “someone once told me” a beat before it.

What Three Owners Actually Tells You

Put the chain together and the pattern is obvious: an idea in the air by 1859, a clean anonymous sentence in print by 1882, then total silence on authorship for over a century, followed by three unconnected people picking up the same orphaned line across a sixteen-year stretch (1998, 2006, 2012) — each attribution independent of the others, each one sticking to a different audience that encountered the quote through a different channel.

That’s not really a story about three people wrongly taking credit. None of them appear to have claimed it. It’s a story about what happens to a genuinely good, ownerless sentence once it’s been circulating anonymously for long enough: it doesn’t stay ownerless. Someone eventually repeats it in a way that looks like authorship, and the internet — which prefers a name to a “source: unknown” — assigns one. Do that three times independently, to three different name-shaped magnets, and you get exactly what this quote has: three biographies, one 1882 newspaper page, and no actual author on record at all.

See the quick-reference verdict for this quote, with the full citation trail, on the original verdict card.