It's true that many such quotes are bogus, but this one can be pinned down. It comes from an interview with Einstein published in LIFE magazine, May 2, 1955: "Never lose a holy curiosity. Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value. He is considered successful in our day who gets more out of life than he puts in. But a man of value will give more than he receives."
Huh? If LIFE from 1955 counts as reading something on the internet, then so does http://www.librarius.com/cantales/knigttl1.htm. (Also, please don't do the memester thing here. The natives don't like it.)
"There are only two kinds of quotes: Those that are ascribed to famous people, and those that aren't good enough to make their authors famous."
-- mechanical_fish
[Note that this doesn't rule out the existence of the many unfortunate authors whose sentences are so good that they get mis-ascribed to even more famous authors, rather than making the original authors themselves famous.]
[Zen practitioners will note the existence of a third type of quote: If a sentence is uttered in the woods but nobody is listening, it will never be attributed to anyone famous.]
whose sentences are so good that they get mis-ascribed to even more famous authors
There seems to be a bucketing algorithm that, over time, labels all the quotes in a bucket with the most famous approximately applicable name. For example, "First they laugh at you..." (early 20th century, subject: social activism) goes to Gandhi instead of Nicholas Klein (who? my point exactly); "Not everything that counts can be counted" (mid 20th century, subject: measuring shit) goes to Einstein instead of William Bruce Cameron. Often the quotes themselves get optimized along the way, so Eliot's "Immature
poets imitate, mature poets steal" (mid 20th century, subject: art) goes to Picasso, but as the snappier "Good artists copy, great artists steal".
It makes sense that this happens as time recedes, for the same reason that you see only the major landmarks at a distance. But it probably gives us a skewed idea of individual genius.
- Gandhi