Where is this from?

Paste a line you have seen attributed to Hermes, to Agrippa, to the Zohar, to “an ancient text” — and this looks for it in every one of the 2,756 volumes this library publishes. If it is there, you get the book, the page, and the sentence as the book prints it, with a link to read it in place. If it is not, you get an exact account of what was searched, which is a finding about these shelves and nothing more.

The passage is matched in your browser against index files fetched from this site. What the server can see is which index files were asked for: the first two letters of each word, and any very common word whole. The passage itself is never sent anywhere, and nothing is stored.

How to read the answer

Found, word for word
The passage occurs on that page exactly as you gave it, allowing for capitals, punctuation and accents. The quotation under it is the page’s own text; the highlighted part is your passage.
A version of it is there
Most of its words occur on one page in the same order — a modernised spelling, a different edition, a word or two changed. The highlight shows what the page actually has, so you can judge the difference yourself.
Only partly
About half its words in order. That may be a loose paraphrase or a coincidence of vocabulary; the page is shown so that you are not asked to take the library’s word for it.
Not found
No page carries it. The verdict says whether some word occurs in none of the 2,756 volumes as written, which settles the matter for these books, or whether pages share its words without carrying the passage. The closest pages are shown anyway. This library says nothing about books it does not hold, and it does not hold everything: works still in copyright, in particular, are not here, so a line from a twentieth-century author will usually come back not found.
Could not be searched
The index holds every word of three letters or more except a fixed list of stop words (the, of, and, that, above, below…). A passage made only of those — as above, so below — cannot be looked for by this method; give it more of the sentence around the line. 604 words occur on more than twenty thousand pages each and are kept in files of their own; the checker fetches those when a passage needs them.
Said to be by
If you name an author, the answer says whether the library holds anything recorded as theirs, and whether the passage was found in one of those or somewhere else. Many a line “from Hermes” turns out to be from a book written in 1908.

The text searched is the library’s own, some of it read from scans by machine. A misread word on the page is a word the checker cannot match, so a near miss in an old or badly scanned volume may be the passage after all — the link goes to the page so you can look. Pages are chosen for checking by the rarer words of your passage, in their old spellings as well as new (shew, originall, enquired), so a paraphrase that keeps the sense but changes every distinctive word is the one case a passage that is there may still come back not found.

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