Fact Check: Lincoln Supposedly Said, 'It's Not the Years in Your Life that Count; It's the Life in Your Years.'
Claim:
Abraham Lincoln once said, "And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count; it's the life in your years."
Rating:
Context:
It's unclear exactly who first uttered the saying, which has appeared in a few different wordings since the 1940s. The earliest source we could potentially attach a name to is a 1947 advertisement for a book by Edward Stieglitz, although similarly worded phrases with different meanings have been used to promote medicinal products and give health advice since at least the 1890s.
Famous inspirational quotes are almost never attributed to the person who actually said them. It's like a game of telephone — the more times a quote passes from ear to ear, the more chances there are to misremember the exact wording or who actually said it.
Such is the case with this quote, which is often attributed to the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln:
"And in the end it's not the years in your life that count; it's the life in your years."
It's been featured in countless advertisements, commencement speeches, and in fact, in 2017, the Republican National Committee posted the quote to Twitter (since renamed X), attributing it to Lincoln. Snopes readers have asked us about the origin of the quote for a long time.
Spoiler alert: the Republican National Committee took the post down — because it wasn't a Lincoln quote.
It's practically impossible to confirm who actually said the words first, because the finer details have been lost over time. While the most common version of the saying is direct, some versions of the quote replace "the years in your life" with "how many years in your life" and "the life in your years" with "how much life in your years."
Using both of these versions as a starting place, however, Snopes was able to trace the saying to the 1940s, if not further.
Aside from Lincoln, the quote is most commonly attributed to a doctor named Edward Stieglitz, where it was featured in an 1947 advertisement for Steiglitz's book, "The Second Forty Years." That version of the quote used "how many" and "how much":
The important thing to you is not how many years in your life, but how much life in your years!
Within the next ten years, however, the adage was employed at least twice by a different Illinois politician: Adlai Stevenson II. According to research from Quote Investigator, Stevenson used the phrase in speeches at least twice, as early as 1952. Quote Investigator is one of the best sources online for quote attributions, and is highly reliable, but out of due diligence, Snopes independently verified that Stevenson used the phrase (he did). Stevenson's version was more direct, dropping the "how many years" and "how much years." This is the version of the quote that is most commonly shared today.
The Quote Investigator article found various different phrasings of the idea dating back as early as 1889, but settled on the Steiglitz version as the first "true" version because it was the earliest to contrast "years in your life" and "life in your years," using the word "but" instead of the word "and." Later versions of the quote dropped both.
Snopes found various articles providing medicinal advice and advertisements for products dating back to the 1890s that suggested consumers could "add years to your life and life to your years." Certainly, the general phrasing (an example of a rhetorical device called antimetabole) was around before 1947. However, we concur with Quote Investigator — the earliest clear references suggesting that a good life was better than a long life were from Stieglitz's 1947 advertisement and Stevenson's 1952 speech.
This comes with some major caveats, however. First, since we know that versions of the phrase with different meanings had been circulating since at least 1889, it's very possible that someone else used the Stieglitz or Stevenson wording first. In fact, since the 1947 Stieglitz version was an advertisement, it's hard to definitively attribute the quote to him, either — a clever copywriter working for an advertising firm could have coined the phrase in order to sell the book.
Sources:
A Quote by Abraham Lincoln. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5851097-and-in-the-end-it-s-not-the-years-in-your. Accessed 31 May 2024.
A Quote from Second Forty Years. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9028920-in-the-end-it-s-not-the-years-in-your-life. Accessed 31 May 2024.
Antimetabole, n. Meanings, Etymology and More | Oxford English Dictionary. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/antimetabole_n. Accessed 31 May 2024.
"Aug 20, 1891, Page 1 - The Oskaloosa Herald at Newspapers.Com." Newspapers.Com, https://www.newspapers.com/image/882782446/. Accessed 31 May 2024.
CaseyNeistat. Make It Count. 2012. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxfZkMm3wcg.
"Dec 04, 1900, Page 3 - The Daily Telegraph at Newspapers.Com." Newspapers.Com, https://www.newspapers.com/image/971571072/. Accessed 31 May 2024.
Fortin, Jacey. "Republicans Tweet, Then Delete, a Fake Lincoln Quote." The New York Times, 13 Feb. 2017. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/us/politics/fake-abraham-lincoln-quote-gop.html.
G, et al. "Lincoln Said What? Bogus Quotations Take On A New Life On Social Media." NPR, 15 May 2017. NPR, https://www.npr.org/2017/05/15/528170534/lincoln-said-what-bogus-quotations-take-on-a-new-life-on-social-media.
It's Not the Years in Your Life That Count. It's the Life in Your Years – Quote Investigator®. 14 July 2012, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/14/life-years-count/.
"Jun 14, 2017, Page A5 - Standard-Speaker at Newspapers.Com." Newspapers.Com, https://www.newspapers.com/image/529444956/. Accessed 31 May 2024.
"Mar 16, 1947, Page 163 - Chicago Tribune at Newspapers.Com." Newspapers.Com, https://www.newspapers.com/image/371786836/. Accessed 31 May 2024.
"Oct 26, 1952, Page 23 - The Boston Globe at Newspapers.Com." Newspapers.Com, https://www.newspapers.com/image/433453888/. Accessed 31 May 2024.
R, et al. "'Hemingway Didn't Say That' (And Neither Did Twain Or Kafka)." NPR, 4 Apr. 2017. NPR, https://www.npr.org/2017/04/04/522581148/hemingway-didnt-say-that-and-neither-did-twain-or-kafka.
"Verify: Did President Lincoln Really Say That?" Wusa9.Com, 13 Feb. 2017, https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/verify-did-president-lincoln-really-say-that/65-408131835.
