He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.

We searched the standard Aristotelian corpus — the *Nicomachean Ethics* (particularly Book III on courage and the fear of pain and death), the *Eudemian Ethics*, the *Rhetoric* (Book II.5, where fear is analyzed as an emotion), the *Politics*, and surviving fragments — and found no passage matching this wording or its aphoristic sentiment. Aristotle treats courage as a mean between fear and rashness, but his prose is technical and conditional and does not frame "overcoming fear" as the path to true freedom in this compact, motivational form; the English phrasing reads as distinctly modern. A book-database check surfaced the line in James Geary's *Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists* (2008) and in later motivational compilations such as *Motivating Thoughts of Aristotle* (2020), but these are curated aphorism collections that repeat the attribution without pointing to any Aristotelian text, so they document the quote's circulation rather than its origin. We found no credible competing author or earlier documented instance — the resemblance to Stoic themes in Seneca or Marcus Aurelius is thematic, not textual, and cannot be pinned to a specific line that would override the Aristotle credit. Under our policy, the absence of a primary source is not itself grounds for calling this misattributed, and there is no reputable scholarly dispute proposing rival candidates. This is a line commonly credited to Aristotle across popular sources but unsupported by any traceable primary text. We classify this quote as attributed.