Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

We searched Aristotle's extant corpus — the Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, Metaphysics, Politics, Rhetoric, and surviving fragments, in standard critical editions and authoritative translations — and found no passage matching "Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom" or a close equivalent in the Greek; Aristotle discusses self-knowledge (self-love, the friend as "another self," phronesis) but never in this tidy epigram. The clear thematic ancestor is the Delphic maxim "Know thyself" (γνῶθι σεαυτόν), witnessed in Plato's Protagoras 343b and associated with the Seven Sages and Socrates — but that is a differently worded predecessor concept, not this exact sentence, and it points toward the Sages/Socrates rather than naming a documented author of this specific English line. Our review of the wider literature turned up only modern books that repeat the sentence, some crediting Aristotle (e.g., Steven Stavropoulos's 2008 The Beginning of All Wisdom) and others treating it as an unattributed aphorism or claiming it as their own, which reflects circulation rather than provenance. The phrasing itself, especially "beginning of all wisdom," reads as a modern English condensation of Socratic/Aristotelian thought rather than a translation of any located ancient text. Crucially, while we can name the older Delphic maxim as a relative, we cannot cite a specific earlier author or documented first use of this exact sentence that would displace Aristotle, so the policy bar for misattribution is not met — this is an unsupported credit, not a demonstrated false one. The quote is widely attributed to Aristotle but we found no primary source confirming it: attributed.