Quote of the Day (sort of)

I'm writing this late Saturday night, and I don't have a lot of time and don't have anything to say, so my plan was to grab a quick quotation and place it on my site (I've done that a handful of times before.)

I searched and found this quotation:

"He who has injured thee was either stronger or weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare thyself."

It was an interesting quotation and I thought I'd use it.

But here's the deal: the quotation was attributed to William Shakespeare. I'm an English major. Not only that, I'm an English major with a love for Shakespeare. As such, I've taken FIVE Shakespeare courses in my life (one in high school, two as an undergrad, and two as a graduate student), and in all of those courses, I had NEVER heard this quote. Now, I haven't read everything that Shakespeare has written, that's true. But I have read ALMOST everything that Shakespeare has ever written, and I think I'd remember this quotation, but I absolutely could not. So I went searching on the Internet. Site after site attributed the quotation to Shakespeare, but not one of them said what work it had come from. A few sites attributed the quotation to Seneca, but none of them said from what work it came, either.

Moreover, the quotation doesn't even SOUND like Shakespeare. To most people not all that familiar with Shakespeare, any sentence that has "thy" or "thou" in it is going to sound like it could have been written by Shakespeare, but trust me--this quotation has several red flags to suggest that it ISN'T Shakespeare. It may actually be a Shakepearian quote, but the odds are about the same as they are of Carrie Underwood singing a hard core rap song.

Anyway, if anyone can tell me where this quote really DOES come from, I'd appreciate it. No one on the Internet seems to know.

And I guess that leads me to what I'm getting at here: You have to take everything on the Internet with a grain of salt. Just because it's there (Even if it's there over and over again, like this quotation is) it doesn't mean it's true.