Why are we obsessed with turning dead writers into self-help gurus?

Quoting literary lions is enough in itself

As Abraham Lincoln once said, 85 per cent of quotes on the Internet are made up. I thought of that sage observation the other day when I saw that an eminent publisher had tweeted some wise words of Charles Dickens: "the most important thing in life is to stop saying 'I wish' and start saying 'I will.' Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilities as probabilities."

If asked to guess the origin of that quotation, I would have said that it came from one of the "Final Thoughts" with which Jerry Springer used to give a spurious moral dimension to his television programme. But many people seem to think Dickens wrote it, and it often appears as a meme against a stirring backdrop of mountains or lakes. One magazine included those words in a round-up of Dickensian wisdom last week, stating that they appear in David Copperfield.