Famous Quotes

Quotes by Benjamin Franklin

• He who falls in love with himself will have no rivals.
• Honesty is the best policy.
• How few there are who have courage enough to own their faults, or resolution enough to mend them.
• Human felicity is produced not as much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.
• Hunger is the best pickle.
• I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.
• I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.
• I saw few die of hunger of eating, a hundred thousand.
• I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.
• I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.
• If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.
• If you would be loved, love, and be loveable.
• If you would know the value of money, go and try to borrow some.
• In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.
• In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.
• In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
• It is a grand mistake to think of being great without goodness and I pronounce it as certain that there was never a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.
• It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.
• It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.
• Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.
• Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed too severe, seldom executed.
• Leisure is the time for doing something useful. This leisure the diligent person will obtain the lazy one never.
• Life's Tragedy is that we get old to soon and wise too late.
• Lost time is never found again.
• Many foxes grow gray but few grow good.
• Marriage is the most natural state of man, and... the state in which you will find solid happiness.
• Money has never made man happy, nor will it, there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more of it one has the more one wants.
• Necessity never made a good bargain.
• Nine men in ten are would be suicides.
• Observe all men, thyself most.
• Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.
• Remember that credit is money.
• Speak ill of no man, but speak all the good you know of everybody.
• Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste.
• Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
• The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.
• The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.
• The doors of wisdom are never shut.
• The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.