Did Pindar really say "Do not aim at immortal life; exhaust what is possible"?

The thought is Pindar's. That sentence is not. The English wording everyone shares descends from the epigraph of Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus in its 1955 American translation, and it circulates as if it were a translation of Pindar you could look up. There is no Pindar edition to look it up in.

The version going around

"Do not aim at immortal life; exhaust what is possible." - attributed to Pindar

It also circulates in a longer form addressed to "my soul," ending in "the limits of the possible."

The receipt

Camus opened Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942) with two lines from Pindar's third Pythian ode. When Justin O'Brien translated the book into English in 1955, his rendering of that epigraph, the one telling the soul not to aspire to immortal life but to exhaust the possible, became the form everyone quotes. That sentence is O'Brien's, written for the front of a Camus book, and it is still under copyright. Quote sites compress it further and stamp "Pindar" on the result.

What Pindar wrote

The Greek, from Pythian 3, lines 61-62:

μή, φίλα ψυχά, βίον ἀθάνατον σπεῦδε, τὰν δ' ἔμπρακτον ἄντλει μαχανάν. - Pindar, Pythian 3.61-62

And a public-domain English translation you can actually cite, Ernest Myers, 1874:

"It behoveth to seek from gods things meet for mortal souls, knowing the things that are in our path and to what portion we are born. Desire not thou, dear my soul, a life immortal, but use the tools that are to thine hand." - Pindar, Pythian 3, trans. Ernest Myers, The Extant Odes of Pindar, 1874

Why this one is worth getting right

The advice is twenty-five centuries old and it survived the trip intact: you are mortal, so stop auditioning for immortality and work with what is in your hands. What did not survive is the paper trail. The "ancient Greek wisdom" being shared reached English through a French essay on the absurd and its American translator, about seventy years ago. Pindar said it to a sick friend. Camus borrowed it for a book about whether life is worth living. The quote sites kept the beauty and lost the receipts.

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Lumoro sends one morning text a day: a verified quote, a plain reading of what it meant, and one small thing to do with it. Every line gets checked against the original source, in translation and, where it matters, against the original language, before it reaches a phone.