MISATTRIBUTED
Nous ne cessons pas de jouer parce que nous vieillissons nous vieillissons parce que nous cessons de jouer
Misattributed
Widely shared under this name, but not theirs.
This quote is commonly circulated under the author's name, but it does not appear in their known works. The true origin is unconfirmed — likely a later paraphrase.
Source
G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904) — earliest strong match: 'men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely'
Editorial Note
This popular epigram is routinely credited to Benjamin Franklin, but it appears nowhere in his documented writings — not in Poor Richard's Almanack, the Autobiography, or the collected Papers — and its cadence belongs firmly to the 20th century, not to Franklin, who died in 1790. The saying in fact evolved from later authors: the earliest strong match traces to G. Stanley Hall's 1904 psychology treatise Adolescence, with a still-earlier germ of the idea in Karl Groos's 1896 The Play of Animals, and it was circulating in print (for example, a 1925 child-welfare journal) generations after Franklin's era. The frequent modern credit to George Bernard Shaw is likewise unfounded — that attribution surfaced only around 1983, more than three decades after Shaw's death — as is the occasional tag to Herbert Spencer. Because a documented origin outside Franklin exists and the phrasing postdates him by well over a century, the Franklin credit is a later accretion attaching a catchy line to a famous name. We therefore class it misattributed.
