Ben Franklin

One of my favorite inspirations is Ben Franklin. Franklin was a true renaissance man. He was a candlemaker, printer, editor, columnist, writer, author, entrepreneur, scientist, philanthropist, community organizer, statesman, humorist, humanitarian and, in his free time, the discoverer of the Gulf Stream and creator of daylight saving time.

It amazes me when I think about all he accomplished during his lifetime. I love revisiting his life in documentaries, his wonderful quotes (below), and I even have his picture up on my office wall. He inspires me to do more with the time I have been given, and to also have a sense of humor about all of it at the same time.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from Benjamin Franklin, which nicely sum up his philosophy on success. If you’d like to read more, I recommend his Autobiography, The Way to Wealth and Fart Proudly for starters. Yes, that’s actually a book! Check it out.

My favorite quotes from Franklin on success

Hundreds more are in the Franklin Quote Library, every line from my Benjamin Franklin Book of Quotes.

If you love those quotes and want the whole story on Franklin, I highly recommend the incredible film about him by PBS. If you make it through the whole documentary, you will find my favorite quote at the very end…

Franklin was born at a time when witches were taught to be real and he died at the dawn of the modern age. It is an age that to a surprising degree he himself helped shape. He came from a society where class determined one’s station in life and he helped create a country where merit and ability could flourish. In a rigid world of orthodoxy and dogma he believed to the core of his soul in the virtues of tolerance and compromise. The quintessential optimist, he never doubted, even for a moment, that the future of humanity lay in the infinite power of human reason.

“The rapid progress of the sciences makes me, at times, sorry that I was born so soon. Imagine the power that man will have over matter a few hundred years from now. We may learn how to remove gravity from large masses and float them over great distances, agriculture will double its produce with less labor, all diseases will surely be cured, even old age. If only the moral sciences could be improved as well. Perhaps men would cease to be wolves to one another and human beings could learn to be… human.”

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