Lewis Carroll? Charles L. Dodgson? Ellen Terry? Anonymous?
Question for Quote Investigator: Altruists believe that the following is a deep insight about life:
What is truly worth doing is what we do for others.
Lewis Carroll, the famous creator of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” apparently said something like this. Would you please help me to find a citation?
Reply from Quote Investigator: In 1890 Lewis Carroll (the pseudonym of English author and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) wrote a letter to the popular English actress Ellen Terry who had performed a favor for him. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1
And so you have found out that secret — one of the deep secrets of Life — that all, that is really worth the doing, is what we do for others? Even as the old adage tells us, “What I spent, that I lost; what I gave, that I had.”
Casuists have tried to twist “doing good” into another form of “doing evil,” and have said “you get pleasure yourself by giving this pleasure to another: so it is merely a refined kind of selfishness, as your own pleasure is a motive for what you do.”
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
In 1974 Langford Reed published the biography “The Life of Lewis Carroll” which described the incident which prompted Carroll’s letter to Ellen Terry. He had asked Terry to provide help to Isa Bowman who was the child of a friend. Terry responded with generosity:2
Another interesting letter, dated November 13th, 1890, refers to Miss Terry’s kindness in giving elocution lessons to little Isa Bowman, when the most the writer expected was that the great actress would provide him with the names and addresses of a few good teachers.
“What is one to do with a friend who does about a hundred times more than you ask her to do?” he enquires, and then declares that Miss Terry must have discovered that “one of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others.”
In 2015 a streamlined version of the quotation appeared in the compilation “Flash Wisdom: A Curated Collection of Mind-Blowing, Perspective-Changing Quotes” assembled by Russ Kick. These two items were adjacent:3
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
—George EliotOne of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others.
—Lewis Carroll
In conclusion, Lewis Carroll deserves credit for the quotation which he penned in an 1890 letter to Ellen Terry. The phrasing is sometimes simplified when it appears in collections of quotations.
Image Notes: Picture of a gift from Erica Marsland Huynh at Unsplash. The image has been cropped.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to Mardy Grothe who included this quotation in his email newsletter of December 24, 2023. The quotation is also listed on Grothe’s website with a citation pointing to the 1890 letter by Lewis Carroll.
- 1982, The Selected Letters of Lewis Carroll by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), Edited by Morton N. Cohen, With the Assistance of Roger Lancelyn Green, Chapter 4: Curator of Senior Common Room, Christ Church, Date of letter: November 13, 1890, Recipient of letter: Ellen Terry, Quote Page 200, Pantheon Books, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1974 (1932 First Edition), The Life of Lewis Carroll by Langford Reed, Chapter 8: The Letters To Ellen Terry, Quote Page 83, Folcroft Library Editions, W. & G. Foyle, London. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 2015, Flash Wisdom: A Curated Collection of Mind-Blowing, Perspective-Changing Quotes, Compiled by Russ Kick, Chapter: Others, Quote Page 202, Disinformation Books, San Francisco, California. (Verified with scans) ↩︎