Misquoting Winnie the Pooh

Uri Bram on a surprising epidemic. This post was originally published in September 2022. 🍯

Certain famous figures are magnets for misattributions; savvy readers have learned to be wary of pearls of wisdom credited to Albert Einstein, The Dalai Lama or Abraham Lincoln. Among the wrongly-credited great minds of our time, though, one figure stands tall (and round) among them: Winnie the Pooh. 

Searching for “pooh quotes” on Google reveals a collage of image macros, a stunning variety of ugly fonts beside iconic representations of the Best Bear in All the World in various saintly poses, laughing or smiling or holding his hands in prayer.

The top “Winnie the Pooh Quotes” Facebook group has 190k members, posting similar macros, but motivational Pooh quote images spread far further and wider. Like fruit at the greenmarket, the specific quotes you encounter may vary by the season, but here are some representative samples—sometimes attributed only to “Winnie the Pooh,” sometimes specifically to his creator A.A. Milne: 

• “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

• “How do you spell love?” “You don’t spell it, you feel it.”

• “Promise me you’ll always remember: you’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

There’s only one problem: none of them are Milne quotes, and to different degrees (we’ll get to that in a minute) it’s arguable whether any of them are Pooh quotes at all. 

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In fact, none of them sound anything like Milne’s Pooh at all, though if your main exposure to Pooh is from internet macros then you’d be forgiven for feeling that they fit the Pooh vibe. It’s almost surreal: a second, phantom Pooh haunts the internet, far more saccharine than anything Milne created, dispensing happy cliches as he walks hand-in-hand with Piglet into the sunset.

In response to these counterfeits, most of us do little more than share smug memes reminding others “not to believe everything you read on the internet, just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it” (~Abraham Lincoln). Life is short, research long, and judgment is difficult.

So I think we owe a great debt to the tiny handful of individuals who actually bother to check citations. Enter our hero: Professor William Levack, who daylights as Dean of the University of Otago Wellington alongside his far more important work as proprietor of Pooh Misquoted, “a somewhat obsessive catalog of the correct, the incorrect, and the borderline-trolling quotations that have been attributed to Pooh and friends.” 

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