Nearly everything "Alexander said" survives only through Arrian, writing roughly 450 years after Alexander's death, and Plutarch, writing roughly 400 years after — neither a contemporary, neither a court scribe taking dictation. Both are reporting battlefield and banquet speech secondhand, in Greek prose shaped by their own literary aims, and every English edition adds a translator's word choices on top of that. That's not a reason to throw the material out. It is a reason to be precise about which lines can be checked word for word against a specific translation, and which are closer to legend. This page keeps the two lists separate.
Two lines confirmed word for word
Both check out exactly against Plutarch's Life of Alexander, John Dryden's translation.
The night before the Battle of Gaugamela — 1 October 331 BC — his general Parmenion urged a surprise night attack on Darius III's much larger army. Alexander refused, telling him:
"I will not steal a victory."
Plutarch notes that some around him thought it a reckless answer for a young commander facing long odds. The next day, in daylight, Alexander broke Darius's field army for good.
Years earlier, at Corinth, Alexander sought out Diogenes the Cynic, who wanted nothing from him — not even for him to stop blocking the sun, as Diogenes told him to his face. Walking away, amused, Alexander said to his followers:
"If he were not Alexander, he would choose to be Diogenes."
The real line behind a popular meme
A version of this circulates everywhere online: "I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well." That exact sentence is not in the Plutarch text. What Plutarch actually records, about Alexander's tutor Aristotle, is close in spirit but different in wording — reported as something Alexander habitually said:
"...as he had received life from the one, so the other had taught him to live well."
That's the traceable original. The tidier internet version is a later paraphrase wearing his name.
Reported, but not yet pinned to a sentence
Arrian's Anabasis of Alexander (E. J. Chinnock's translation) records two further exchanges that are well attested in outline, though the exact clause-level English wording hasn't been re-confirmed against a specific chapter here. After the Battle of Issus, Darius III offered Alexander part of his territory and a ransom for his captured family. Parmenion argued for accepting; Arrian has Alexander answering that he would take the same view if he were Parmenio — and refusing anyway, because he wanted the whole of Darius's kingdom, not a share of it. After the Battle of the Hydaspes in 326 BC, Arrian has the defeated King Porus asking to be treated "as a king." Treat any single tidy English sentence you see for either exchange as one translator's rendering, not a settled quotation, until it's checked line by line.
Quotes to avoid
Three lines get attached to Alexander constantly with no ancient source behind them: "There is nothing impossible to him who will try," the "indebted to my father... to my teacher" phrasing above in its popular (not Plutarch's) wording, and any "the world isn't big enough for two suns" formulation. None of these turned up in the Arrian or Plutarch text. Treat them as internet folklore, not history.
None of this quotable material stands in for the rest of the record. The same campaigns that produced "I will not steal a victory" also produced the massacre and enslavement at Tyre and the burning of Persepolis — see the facts page for the ledger a quotes page alone leaves out. Full biography, and how it ended: death. Overview: hub.