I don’t want to wander too far from debunking Fake Buddha Quotes, but since I recently discussed a quote, “To understand everything is to forgive everything,” which is sometimes attributed to the Buddha but which has for a long time been attributed to Mme. de Staël (1766–1817) — even though she probably never said it — I was amused to see the following also attributed to her in an Indian newspaper article:
“Prayer is more than meditation. In meditation, the source of strength is one’s self. When one prays, he goes to a source of strength greater than his own.”
This seemed totally, even bizarrely, anachronistic, and it didn’t take long to find that it’s actually something a different Madame — Madame Chiang Kai-Shek — wrote in a 1943 article called “The Infinite Guidance.”