Confucius didn’t write it · Oliver Goldsmith did, in the voice of a Chinese traveller · 1760–1762
No. “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall” was written by Oliver Goldsmith, an Irish novelist, in letters that ran in a London magazine through 1760 and 1761 and were collected in 1762 as The Citizen of the World. The letters are fiction, written as if by a Chinese traveller named Lien Chi Altangi living in London. The sentence was first printed with Confucius’s name attached in 1831, and it has been handed from one famous name to another ever since. What Confucius did say about falling down and getting back up, with chapters you can check yourself, is further down this page.
Confucius quotes about failure at a glance
| Quote | Source | What it covers |
| “If there want but one basket of earth to complete the work, and I stop, the stopping is my own work.” | Analects 9.19 | Stopping one basket short is your doing, not luck’s |
| “Those whose strength is insufficient give over in the middle of the way but now you limit yourself.” | Analects 6.12 | Running out of strength isn’t the same as drawing your own line |
| “When the year becomes cold, then we know how the pine and the cypress are the last to lose their leaves.” | Analects 9.28 | Hard times are what reveal a person |
| “When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.” | Analects 1.8 | Correcting course isn’t shameful |
| “To have faults and not to reform them, this, indeed, should be pronounced having faults.” | Analects 15.30 | The fault is staying down, not the fall |
| “The faults of the superior man are like the eclipses of the sun and moon. He has his faults, and all men see them; he changes again, and all men look up to him.” | Analects 19.21 | Recovery is public, and that’s fine (spoken by Zigong) |
Who wrote “our greatest glory is not in never falling”?
An Irishman writing Chinese philosophy that was never Chinese.
Goldsmith was born in 1728 in Ireland, and by 1760 he was in London writing for hire. That year he started a series of letters in a magazine called The Public Ledger, signed by a fictional Chinese traveller in London, Lien Chi Altangi, writing home to friends in the East. The device let him satirise English manners from outside them. It worked well enough that the letters were gathered into a book in 1762: The Citizen of the World: or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London, to His Friends in the East.
The line appears in Letter VII, inside a passage where the narrator says he is reading Confucius to steady himself after his family has been taken into captivity by the emperor.
“But I submit to the stroke of Heaven: I hold the volume of Confucius in my hand, and, as I read, grow humble, and patient, and wise. We should feel sorrow, says he, but not sink under its oppression… Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
— Not Confucius. Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, Letter VII, 1762
Read that slowly. The sentence isn’t a quotation from Confucius in the text. It’s a sentence put into the mouth of a made-up Chinese man who says he’s holding a book of Confucius while he writes. Goldsmith printed the same idea again in a later letter with different wording: “True magnanimity consists not in NEVER falling, but in RISING every time we fall.” I’ve read the 1762 printing in the University of Michigan’s transcript of Letter VII rather than a quotation site, and the sentence sits exactly where Quote Investigator put it, in the middle of the narrator’s account of his family’s captivity.
Here is the paper trail, in order.
| Year | Where it appeared | Credited to |
| 1760–61 | The Public Ledger, London, letters signed Lien Chi Altangi | No one; the narrator is Chinese and the author is not named |
| 1762 | The Citizen of the World, Letter VII (Dublin) | Printed as the voice of the fictional Chinese narrator |
| 1801 | The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith, vol. 3, p. 21 | Goldsmith, correctly |
| 1806 | The Emerald, Boston, as the punchline of a joke about a drunk | Goldsmith, with “virtue” swapped in for “magnanimity” |
| 1824 | A book of religious instruction, London | Goldsmith |
| 1831 | The Royal Lady’s Magazine, London, under the heading “Perseverance” | Confucius |
| 1893 | Dictionary of Quotations, compiled by Rev. James Wood | Christian Nestell Bovee |
| 1899 | Across the Campus, a college novel | Confucius |
| 1900 | Gems of Literature, South Dakota | Ralph Waldo Emerson |
| 1908 | A Dictionary of Thoughts, ed. Tryon Edwards | Printed three times: once to Bovee, twice to Goldsmith |
| 1969 | Marietta Journal, quarterback Bart Starr quoting his coach | Vince Lombardi |
| 1998 | White House reception, reported by The New York Times, 23 Sept | Nelson Mandela, using it |
Two things in that table deserve a pause. First, the credit was right for seventy years. Goldsmith’s name is on it from 1801 through 1824, and then it falls off. Second, once it falls off it never settles: Bovee, Emerson, Confucius, Lombardi, Mandela. A line that keeps changing owners is a line nobody can source.
Quote Investigator traced this in 2014 and concluded that Goldsmith should get the credit, and that the two forms he wrote in the 1760s are the earliest known. Its own hedge is worth keeping: “It is conceivable that Confucius wrote something similar, but at this time QI has not located a matching statement to support this claim.” Nobody has, in the twelve years since either.
Why did the line end up on Confucius?
Three accidents stacked up, and the first one was printed by the publisher.
The book was already pretending to be Chinese. A reader in 1762 buying Letters from a Chinese Philosopher wasn’t buying satire. They were buying what the title offered. Every aphorism inside it read as imported wisdom, because that was the joke.
The editor told readers it was Confucius. Letter VII carries a note before the text begins:
“The Editor thinks proper to acquaint the reader, that the greatest part of the following letter seems to him to be little more than a rhapsody of sentences borrowed from Confucius, the Chinese philosopher.”
— Not Confucius. Editorial note to Letter VII, The Citizen of the World, 1762
That note was a wink. It was written to explain the flavour of the letter, and it says “seems to him” and “little more than a rhapsody,” which is not how a source note reads. It was read as one anyway. In 1831 a London magazine printed the maxim under the heading “Perseverance” with a single word after it: Confucius. The editor’s joke had become a citation.
Nobody could check. The Analects wasn’t searchable in English in 1831, and the sentence has no Chinese behind it. If you’d asked a scholar in Canton to find “our greatest glory is not in never falling” in the classics, they’d have had nothing to find. There was no original to compare against, so there was no way to be wrong in public.
I’ve watched the same three-part machine run on dozens of other lines attached to Confucius: a book that reads as foreign, a note that reads as a source, and an audience with no way to verify.
What Confucius actually said about falling and getting up
He said a fair amount, and it’s more specific than the modern line.
Stopping one basket short is your own doing
“The prosecution of learning may be compared to what may happen in raising a mound. If there want but one basket of earth to complete the work, and I stop, the stopping is my own work. It may be compared to throwing down the earth on the level ground. Though but one basketful is thrown at a time, the advancing with it is my own going forward.”
— Analects 9.19「子罕」· 譬如為山，未成一簣，止，吾止也；譬如平地，雖覆一簣，進，吾往也。· trans. Legge, 1861
This is the closest real thing in the canon to “our greatest glory is not in never falling,” and it’s sharper. The mound needs one more basket. He stops. 吾止也, the stopping is mine. Then the mirror image: level ground, one basket at a time, 吾往也, the going forward is mine too. Both halves put the agency on the person, and neither half mentions glory.
Running out of strength isn’t the same as drawing your own line
“Those whose strength is insufficient give over in the middle of the way but now you limit yourself.”
— Analects 6.12「雍也」· 力不足者，中道而廢，今女畫。· trans. Legge, 1861
Ran Qiu, a disciple, had claimed he couldn’t keep up with the teaching because his strength gave out. Confucius isn’t having it. 中道而廢, giving over halfway, is what happens to someone who genuinely can’t continue. 畫 means drawing a boundary line, and that’s what he accuses Ran Qiu of doing: not falling down, but marking a line on the ground and refusing to cross it. It’s a distinction the modern maxim flattens out completely.
The fault is not the mistake, it’s staying in it
“To have faults and not to reform them, this, indeed, should be pronounced having faults.”
— Analects 15.30「衛靈公」· 過而不改，是謂過矣。· trans. Legge, 1861
Eight characters, and the whole structure of the famous line is in them: falling isn’t the problem, not getting up is. What Confucius means by 過 is narrower than what modern English means by failure. It’s a fault, an error you can correct. Misfortune isn’t in view. Still, if you want a Confucius line that genuinely carries the sentiment people are reaching for, this is the one to quote, and it’s eight characters long, which fits on a slide.
He put the same point earlier and more gently, in Analects 1.8: 過則勿憚改, when you have faults, don’t fear abandoning them. Don’t fear is the operative part. If you need one line to pin to a slide, I’d take this one over the maxim everyone actually pins.
Adversity is the test, not the interruption
“When the year becomes cold, then we know how the pine and the cypress are the last to lose their leaves.”
— Analects 9.28「子罕」· 歲寒，然後知松柏之後彫也。· trans. Legge, 1861
Cold is what makes the difference visible. There’s no promise here that you’ll rise, and no glory attached to the rising. It’s a claim about evidence: you don’t know what a person is made of until the weather turns.
Being seen to recover is part of it
“The faults of the superior man are like the eclipses of the sun and moon. He has his faults, and all men see them; he changes again, and all men look up to him.”
— Analects 19.21「子張」· 君子之過也，如日月之食焉；過也，人皆見之；更也，人皆仰之。· trans. Legge, 1861
One caution: the speaker here is Zigong, a disciple, not Confucius himself. That’s printed in the text and it’s exactly the kind of detail quote sites drop. Worth noting too that this is a rarer idea than “failure is fine.” The superior man’s mistakes are visible to everyone, and the recovery is visible to everyone. There’s no privacy in either direction.
The Chinese text of all six is at the Analects, Zi Han and the surrounding chapters, and Legge’s 1861 Analects is free to read end to end if you want to check my quotations against the translation.
The version that sounds like a Chinese proverb
It doesn’t rescue the attribution, because “the Chinese say” is not a citation.
In 1908 Tryon Edwards printed the maxim three times in A Dictionary of Thoughts. Under the heading “Error,” he embedded it in a passage credited to Christian Nestell Bovee, an American epigrammatist:
“It is only an error of judgment to make a mistake, but it argues an infirmity of character to adhere to it when discovered. The Chinese say, ‘The glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time you fall.’ Bovee.”
— Not Confucius. A Dictionary of Thoughts, ed. Tryon Edwards, 1908, p. 149
Three problems, and they’re the standard ones. Bovee was born in 1820, sixty years after Goldsmith printed the line, so he can’t be the author. “The Chinese say” names a civilisation rather than a text, which is what people write when they have no source and want the sentence to keep its authority. And no Chinese sentence has ever been produced for it, in 1908 or since. Edwards printed it twice more in the same volume under Goldsmith’s name, so the book contradicts itself and the honest version is the one nobody quoted.
Did Mandela or Lombardi say it? Two names it’s been misattributed to
Both used it. Neither wrote it.
Nelson Mandela said it at a White House reception in September 1998, standing beside a beleaguered Bill Clinton: “If our expectations, if our fondest prayers and dreams, are not realized, then we should all bear in mind that the greatest glory of living lies not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.” The New York Times reported it on 23 September. Mandela didn’t claim it, and he was using a version with “the greatest glory of living” in it, which is the phrasing that now circulates under his name.
Vince Lombardi’s case runs through his quarterback. Bart Starr told a reporter in 1969 that his coach had said “our greatest glory here in the Packer organization was not in never falling, but in rising every time we fell.” Lombardi was quoting something already in circulation.
Neither man is a candidate for authorship. Both are examples of how a quotation keeps its authority by moving to a bigger name. If you want to use the line, credit Goldsmith, or credit nobody. Crediting Mandela is a second-order error, and it’s the version that dominates image macros today.
One more that travels in the same company: “Fall seven times, stand up eight.” That one is Japanese, 七転び八起き, nanakorobi yaoki. It isn’t Chinese and it has nothing to do with Confucius, though it shares a lot of social media real estate with the Goldsmith line.
How do you check a line like this yourself?
Four steps, and the second one does most of the work.
- Ask for the chapter. A genuine Analects quotation comes with a book and chapter number, because that’s how the text is organised. If a page won’t give you one, it doesn’t have one.
- Look for the Chinese. Every line in the Analects has an original. If your English sentence has no Chinese behind it, nobody translated it from anything.
- Check who’s speaking, including whether they exist. Confucius speaks maybe half the time; his students speak a good part of the rest. And sometimes, as here, the speaker is a fictional Chinese traveller invented by an Irish novelist.
- Check the date. “Our greatest glory” is modern English idiom. A text closed by the third century BCE has no sentence like it behind it, and no translation from any period produces one.
That’s the sequence I run before any line goes on this site, and it takes about a minute once you know where the chapters live.
I’ve pulled apart eleven more of these in Fake Confucius Quotes, and if you want the genuine passages on the same ground, Confucius quotes on life collects them with chapters.
Questions People Ask
Did Confucius say “our greatest glory is not in never falling”?
No. There is no such line in the Analects, and no Chinese source for it in any translation. It was written by Oliver Goldsmith in 1760 or 1761 and printed in book form in 1762. The first known printing with Confucius’s name on it is a London magazine of 1831.
Who wrote “our greatest glory is not in never falling”?
Oliver Goldsmith, an Irish writer, in the letters collected as The Citizen of the World (1762). The wording in the book is “Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall,” with a comma after “is.” He wrote a second version in a later letter: “True magnanimity consists not in NEVER falling, but in RISING every time we fall.”
Where does the quote come from?
The quote’s origin is Letter VII of The Citizen of the World (1762), a book of fictional letters from an invented Chinese traveller in London. The editor’s note to that letter said the contents were “little more than a rhapsody of sentences borrowed from Confucius,” which is why readers began treating it as Chinese. By 1831 it was being printed under Confucius’s name.
Did Nelson Mandela say it?
He said it, but he didn’t write it. Mandela used the line at a White House reception in September 1998 with the wording “the greatest glory of living lies not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.” Goldsmith’s version is 226 years older.
Did Vince Lombardi say it?
He used it, and his quarterback Bart Starr relayed it to a reporter in 1969: “our greatest glory here in the Packer organization was not in never falling, but in rising every time we fell.” Lombardi was repeating a maxim that had been in print since the 1760s.
What’s the closest real Confucius quote about getting back up?
Analects 15.30: “To have faults and not to reform them, this, indeed, should be pronounced having faults.” Eight characters in Chinese, 過而不改，是謂過矣, and it carries the same structure as the modern maxim. Analects 9.19 is the other candidate: if the mound needs one more basket and you stop, 吾止也, the stopping is yours.
Is “fall seven times, stand up eight” a Confucius quote?
No. It’s a Japanese proverb, 七転び八起き (nanakorobi yaoki), often associated with the Daruma tumbler doll that rights itself when knocked over. It gets filed next to Confucius because it sits on the same motivational images, not because of any Chinese source.
