Most people fail in life not because they aim too high and miss, but because they aim too low and hit.

This crisp motivational line is consistently credited to Les Brown across countless collections and even appears verbatim in several published anthologies bearing his name, and clips show he does use it on stage — but we could not trace it to any authored primary source of his: not his books (Live Your Dreams, It's Not Over Until You Win, You Can Be Anything You Want to Be), nor a dated speech transcript or interview. More to the point, it is a compressed restatement of a much older, well-traveled maxim usually credited to Michelangelo ("The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark") — an attribution that is itself unsupported, appearing in print only from around 1980 (unattributed, in E. C. McKenzie's Mac's Giant Book of Quips & Quotes) and pinned to Michelangelo only since the late 1990s. Because a credible competing origin for the sentiment is seriously and widely proposed, and because the maxim demonstrably predates Brown's career, we treat Brown as a popularizer rather than the documented author. We therefore classify this as disputed: the words are firmly in circulation and everywhere linked to Brown, but their true authorship is genuinely contested and unresolved.