Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.

We searched the places where Mandela's own words are documented — his autobiography *Long Walk to Freedom*, *Conversations with Myself*, the Nelson Mandela Foundation's archives, his major speeches including the Rivonia Trial statement and the 1994 inaugural address, and recorded interviews from his lifetime — and could not connect this exact sentence to any of them. The line circulates very widely as a Mandela quotation, but the printed appearances we found — in books such as Jeffery J. Horacek's *Restore My Spirit, O God* (2019), B. Martin Lopez's *Go With the Flow and Find Your Way!* (2022), and Lindsey Pollak's *Recalculating* (2021) — all credit Mandela without any citation to a primary document, which is a pattern typical of inspirational aphorisms passed hand to hand rather than traced to a source. We noted that a related "rising after falling" sentiment ("The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall") is often bundled with Mandela and has been traced by others to earlier writers, but that is a different sentence and does not give us a citable competing origin for this specific wording. Under our policy, the absence of a Mandela source is not itself proof that someone else said it first, and we found no named alternative author or documented earlier instance for this exact line. What we have is a popular attribution to Mandela that no primary source confirms and no credible rival origin displaces. On the evidence available, we are marking this quotation as attributed.