In 1893 Swami Vivekananda wanted to speak at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. He had no credentials as a delegate. John Henry Wright, a professor of Greek at Harvard, gave him a letter of introduction.
According to accounts of his life, Wright told him: “To ask you, Swami, for your credentials is like asking the sun to state its right to shine.” In the letter he is said to have written: “Here is a man who is more learned than all our learned professors put together.”
Both lines come from later accounts, and the wording of the first varies between them.