On April 26, 2021, the day after Sir Anthony Hopkins won his second Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the movie "The Father," a passage ostensibly written by him started to recirculate on social media:
Those words — "Let go of people who aren't ready to love you yet! This is the hardest thing you'll have to do in your life and it will also be the most important thing: stop giving your love to those who aren't ready to love you yet" — were not written by Hopkins.
While this quote is often shared in a meme format as shown above, it is also circulated as part of an essay-length piece of text that is also misattributed to Hopkins. One indication that the actor did not write this essay is that none of the social media users or blog authors sharing this quote make any mention of where or when Hopkins supposedly published this essay.
This quote appears to have been first attributed to Hopkins circa September 2020. However, this essay predates Hopkins' alleged authorship by about two years. In December 2018, writer Brianna Wiest published an essay entitled "This Year, Let Go Of The People Who Aren't Ready To Love You" on Thought Catalog.
With the exception of a slight modification to the first line / title — Wiest writes "let go of the people who aren't ready to love you," while the "Hopkins" version starts "Let go of people who aren't ready to love you yet" — these texts are practically verbatim copies of one another. As Wiest's version was published two years before Hopkins' name was attached to this text, and as Wiest is an essayist with similar works published in her book "101 Essays to Change the Way You Think" (and not an actor who is better known for acting than essay writing), it's safe to say that Wiest is the original author of this essay, not Hopkins.