In the book­store today a cus­tomer called in and asked about “Let your lives speak,” a phrase fre­quent­ly attrib­uted to George Fox (it’s the source of a book title, “Lives that Speak”). While a quick Google search finds lots of pages where peo­ple say things like “as George Fox said, you should ‘let your lives speak,’” no one actu­al­ly gives details of when and where he said it. The phrase seems to sit only by itself, with no pas­sages before or after it. A few sites claim it was part of his mes­sage on Fir­bank Fell but no one cites a source. Sit­ting on the same Palm Pilot as the Yard­birds MP3s is Fox’s Jour­nal (Jones edi­tion) and a key­word search doesn’t pick up “lives that speak” or “let your lives speak” any­where. Smells fishy, like anoth­er one of those too-good-to-be-true Fox quotes. Can any­one doc­u­ment that it’s real?

PS: I fly bright and ear­ly tomor­row morn­ing for this year’s Quak­ers Unit­ing in Pub­li­ca­tions meet­ing, in Ore­gon. I don’t know what inter­net access I’ll have so my apolo­gies if new com­ments have to sit for a few days.