It’s no secret that I like quotes. Since converting my Facebook profile to a Facebook page, I’ve gotten into the habit of sharing a “quote of the day.” If my calculations are correct, I’ve been sharing quotes of the day for over 80 days now. As you’ll notice that I also have a quotes category, I’ve shared a number of quotes here on this site, too. And if I think back to the days of AIM (AOL Instant Manager), I often had quotes as my “away” message. And even before then, I remember really liking quotes in high school and in elementary (or grade) school. So, like I said, it’s no secret that I like quotes.
As you may have noticed, the title of this post is a quote. I’ve seen this quote in many places — most recently, on a Harvard Business Review comment:
Failure is seldom fatal or final. I loved the line in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movie. “It will be alright in the end and if it is not alright, it is not the end.”
Some may quibble over the word “alright” vs. the word “OK,” but the essence of the quote is the same. After seeing it there, I felt motivated to find the original author. Not that I was planning on digging through reams of archives at an historic library, but just that I thought with some Google-sleuthing, I’d be able to figure it out. It’s a quote that I often see unattributed and I thought to myself that someone had to have said that at some point, right? I did something like this about 18 months ago, when I wrote a post about a great quote being often incorrectly attributed to Howard Whitman — when in fact it was spoken by Howard Thurman.
So, after some Google-sleuthing, I came to a Wikipedia page for Fernando Sabino, who was a Brazilian writer. On that page were a few quotes, one of which read:
“No fim, tudo dá certo. Se não deu, ainda não chegou ao fim.”
The translation follows:
“In the end, everything will be ok. If it’s not ok, it’s not yet the end.”
Having seen how incorrect Wikipedia can be sometimes (pranksters, of course), I thought I’d wait for a while before being sure that this was correct. [Note: I originally wanted to include a link to an image I uploaded to Twitter that showed “Buddha” as the author of The Hunger Games, but apparently old images on Twitter are deleted — or something like that. So, you’ll just have to imagine that there was a screengrab showing “Buddha” as the author on The Hunger Games Wikipedia page.] And then I thought, this Wikipedia page probably isn’t visited nearly as often as The Hunger Games page, so I thought I could trust it. So, I plugged the same Portuguese from the page into Google Translate (just to see if it was the same), and I got a similar quote to the English that appears on the page.
My next step was to see if I could find this quote attributed to him somewhere else on the Internet. Since this quote is often unattributed, this took a bit more time. When I noticed I was hitting a bit of a roadblock, I thought I’d see if I could find other pages on the web of Sabino — and I did! I found a Facebook page for him. While it doesn’t take “too” much effort to create a Facebook page, I noticed that there were almost 2000 likes and that the page has been around for 3+ years. I noticed that the quote was also on the Facebook page. And next to the quote was this:
– Fonte: “No fim dá certo”
When I plugged this into Google Translate, it said, “- Source: “In the end it works.” So, now I had a source! In looking for that source in English, I didn’t have much luck, so I used the Portuguese. One of the first Google results was a book! The book was also available on Google Books, (but I couldn’t see very much of it, so searching the book for the quote was difficult). Not to mention that I don’t speak Portuguese and sometimes, when you look for words on Google Books, they don’t always show as being there (even though they are there).
It’s still quite possible that I fell victim to some sort of hoax (not as elaborate as Lance Armstrong or Manti T’eo, though). I am fairly confident (at least 90%) that Fernando Sabino is the original author of this quote.
Jeremiah Stanghini 
I just started the same search for attribution and came across your page. I do speak some Portuguese, so I picked up your trail on Google books and moved it to Amazon. It turns out the full title of the book is “No fim dá certo. Se não deu, é porque não chegou ao fim.” Which basically translates as, “It works out in the end. If it didn’t work out, it’s because the end hasn’t come.” So the translation above is good, just minus the “everything” and “yet.” (That would be “No fim TUDO dá certo. Se não deu, é porque AINDA não chegou ao fim,” which I have also found online, but the Amazon picture of the book cover does not include these words.)
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You’ll finde it here http://www.releituras.com/fsabino_meupai.asp. It’s really Fernando Sabino’s quote
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I think the book is “O Menino No Espelho” by Fernando Sabino and what you state is a quote from the book, not the title?
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It looks like you’re talking about the second last paragraph of the post. To be fair, I was only saying that the book came up as a result and not that the quote was the title of the book.
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Excellent. Thank you for your time and generosity.
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Fascinating, thanks all. Please can someone tell me the first publication date of “O Menino No Espelho”. Sadly I don’t speak Portuguese.
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Good job, sleuthing. Thanks!
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I heartfully thank you for your extra effort.
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