{"id":119947,"date":"2026-11-09T08:40:40","date_gmt":"2026-11-09T13:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=119947"},"modified":"2026-11-09T08:40:40","modified_gmt":"2026-11-09T13:40:40","slug":"between-stimulus-and-response-there-is-a-space-who-said-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/quotes\/between-stimulus-and-response-there-is-a-space-who-said-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Said “Between Stimulus and Response There Is a Space”? Not Frankl"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>15 Minute, 27 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

You have almost certainly met this one, and you have almost certainly seen a name under it.<\/p>\n\n

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

The name underneath is nearly always Viktor Frankl. But nobody has been able to find those words in anything Frankl wrote. The Viktor Frankl Institute in Vienna, which looks after his work, keeps a page about this exact sentence on its own website, filed under the heading “Alleged quote.”<\/p>\n\n

The trail leads somewhere else entirely \u2014 to Stephen R. Covey, who said he found the words in a library book whose title and author he never wrote down, and who never claimed them as his own either.<\/p>\n\n

That is the short answer. The longer one is better, because it involves a lost library, a psychologist who has never been given the credit, and a phrase that started life as an argument rather than an encouragement.<\/p>\n\n

Where “between stimulus and response there is a space” first appears in print<\/h2>\n\n

The Frankl connection is real, and it starts with Covey.<\/p>\n\n

In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People<\/em> (Simon & Schuster, 1989), Covey wrote about Frankl’s freedom, or power, to choose \u2014 and placed that freedom between what happened to Frankl, the stimulus, and his response. That is Covey describing Frankl’s idea in Covey’s words. It is not a quotation from Frankl, and it was never presented as one.<\/p>\n\n

The sentence in the form people now share it appears in print five years later, in First Things First<\/em> (1994), written by Covey with A. Roger Merrill and Rebecca R. Merrill. Covey said there that he had come across the passage in a book, and that what he was giving was the essence of it.<\/p>\n\n

“The essence of it” is a writer telling you plainly that he is working from memory.<\/p>\n\n

Over the years he told the story of where he found it, and the details are worth having:<\/p>\n\n

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  • He had been reading in a university library in Hawaii. In a 2004 foreword he dated it to 1969, a sabbatical year.<\/li>\n
  • A passage about a gap between stimulus and response stopped him, and he thought it put Frankl’s thinking beautifully.<\/li>\n
  • He never noted down the author or the title.<\/li>\n
  • In a 2008 foreword he gave the wording a little differently again \u2014 and mentioned that when he returned to Hawaii years later, the library building was gone.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n

    Read that last line slowly. The one person who ever saw the original page could not find the room again.<\/p>\n\n

    So this is not a case of someone putting a famous name on a sentence to give it weight. It is a man summarising a book he admired, saying out loud that he was summarising, and the attribution hardening quietly over the next thirty years of retellings until the “roughly, as I remember it” fell off and only the name was left.<\/p>\n\n

    That is how nearly all of these happen. It is the same shape as the line everyone gives to Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben, which we traced in who really said “with great power comes great responsibility”<\/a> \u2014 nobody lied, the sentence just got passed along until the source dropped out of the retelling.<\/p>\n\n