How we verify every quote

Why this matters

Most quotes that circulate online are misattributed, trimmed or reworded. “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken” is not in Oscar Wilde’s works, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” is not Einstein’s, and “Elementary, my dear Watson” never appears in Conan Doyle’s stories. A quote is only as good as the evidence behind it, so we show the evidence instead of asking you to trust a name.

1. Only public-domain writers and works

A quote qualifies only if all of these hold:

• the author died in 1955 or earlier;
• the work was first published in 1930 or earlier;
• for a translation, the translator also died in 1955 or earlier and the translation was published in1930 or earlier. We never translate anything ourselves.

The first rule matches the “life plus 70 years” term used in the UK and the EU; the second matches the United States, where works published in 1930 or earlier are in the public domain as of 2026. Requiring both keeps every quote free to publish in either place. The rules are checked by an automated test on every change to the data, so a quote that breaks them cannot be published by mistake.

2. The exact words, matched in a named edition

Every candidate quote names one Project Gutenberg ebook: the edition its wording should come from. A script downloads that ebook’s full text, strips Project Gutenberg’s header and licence, and checks that the quote appears in the book as one continuous passage, with the same letters in the same case.

The comparison ignores typography only: curly and straight quote marks, the different kinds of dash, spacing and line breaks, words hyphenated across a line end, and the underscores Project Gutenberg uses for italics. Anything else, a changed word, a dropped clause, a modernised spelling, means the quote is not found, and a quote that is not found is not published. There is no “unverified” category.

3. A link to the edition

Every quote carries a “Verified in the full text” link to the Project Gutenberg page of the edition it was matched in, where the book can be read or downloaded for free. The quote is shown exactly as printed there, including old spellings such as “thou” or “employ’d”. When a quote starts mid-sentence or stops at a comma, we add an ellipsis (…) to show the sentence goes on; the words between are untouched.

4. What we reject

• Modern quotes. Nothing by a writer who died after 1955 or from a work published after1930, however popular.
• Misattributions. Lines credited to famous people that their works don’t contain.
• Paraphrases and “improved” versions. If the book says it differently, we use the book’s words or nothing.
• Second-hand sources. A quote found only on quote sites, in anthologies or in someone else’s article is not enough.
• Anonymous proverbs and sayings. There is no original text to check them against.
• Our own or machine translations. Only translations published in 1930 or earlier, by a translator we name.

5. What we add

• The attribution. Author, work and the year it was first published. When the words belong to a character, we say so: “— Amy March, in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, 1869”. For plays, the year is the first printing. For ancient works, it is an approximate date of writing, shown as “c.”.
• A short note of our own on where the words come from. It is ours, not part of the quote.
• Topics, so quotes on a theme can be read together.

6. How the daily quote is chosen

Everyone on the same calendar date sees the same quote, and it changes at midnight where you are. The order is fixed in advance: no quote returns until every other one has had its day, and one writer’s quotes are spread out so the same name doesn’t come up two days running. New quotes join the rotation without changing any day that has already been published, so a shared link always shows the quote it was shared with.

7. Corrections

If a quote turns out to be wrong, we withdraw it. The days it had show another verified quote, and every other day stays as it was.

The collection today

525 verified quotes from 93 writers and 203 works, matched in 146 Project Gutenberg editions and first published between c. 475 BC and 1925. 77 of them are translations.

Topics with at least 12 quotes have their own page:change, character, courage, curiosity, freedom, friendship, gratitude, happiness, honesty, hope, humility, imagination, kindness, learning, love, nature, perseverance, reading, simplicity, solitude, time, wisdom, work. So do writers with at least 12:Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, Jane Austen, Marcus Aurelius, Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Shakespeare.

Today’s quote is on the Quote of the Day page, and every past day is in thearchive.