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How does one live a life that is useful, virtuous, worthy, moral, and spiritually meaningful?
“Fish and guests stink after three days.”
History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.
“Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom,” it declared, “and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.”39
“some late thoughts of this nature have inclined me to think that the hypocrite is the most dangerous person of the two, especially if he sustains a post in the government.”
“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”
people are more likely to admire your work if you’re able to keep them from feeling jealous of you.
“Let this be a caution to you not always to hold your head so high. Stoop, young man, stoop—as you go through this world—and you’ll miss many hard thumps.”
A secret to being more revered than resented, he learned, was to display (at least when he could muster the discipline) a self-deprecating humor, unpretentious demeanor, and unaggressive style in conversation.9
“He wished to please everybody,” Franklin later said of Keith, “and having little to give, he gave expectations.”11
“Truth and sincerity have a certain distinguishing native luster about them which cannot be perfectly counterfeited; they are like fire and flame, that cannot be painted.”
The rule, he decided, applied to other battles; a person who is too fearful will end up performing defensively and thus fail to seize offensive advantages.
Knowledge, he realized, “was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue.”
“Would you win the hearts of others, you must not seem to vie with them, but to admire them. Give them every opportunity of displaying their own qualifications, and when you have indulged their vanity, they will praise you in turn and prefer you above others . . . Such is the vanity of mankind that minding what others say is a much surer way of pleasing them than talking well ourselves.”
The job of printers is to allow people to express these differing opinions. “There would be very little printed,” he noted, if publishers produced only things that offended nobody.
“Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”
“Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.”24
The purpose of religion should be to make men better and to improve society, and any sect or creed that did so was fine with him.
“Faith is recommended as a means of producing morality,”
“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”14
“Our father, who was a very wise man, used to say nothing was more common than for those who loved one another at a distance to find many causes of dislike when they came together.”
fear the giving mankind a dependence on anything for support in age or sickness, besides industry and frugality during youth and health, tends to flatter our natural indolence, to encourage idleness and prodigality, and thereby to promote and increase poverty, the very evil it was intended to cure.”
“I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.”32
“America’s great historical moments,” writes historian Bernard Bailyn, “have occurred when realism and idealism have been combined, and no one knew this better than Franklin.”
“Moderate your desire of victory over your adversary, and be pleased with the one over yourself.”
“I have never known a peace made, even the most advantageous, that was not censured as inadequate,” he said. “ ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ is, I suppose, to be understood in the other world, for in this they are frequently cursed.”23
Even if a person borrows money from another and then repays it, he still owes gratitude: “He has discharged the money debt, but the obligation remains.”
“Mr. Oswald, an old man, seems now to have no desire but that of being useful in doing good,”
“Mr. Grenville, a young man, naturally desirous of acquiring a reputation, seems to aim at that of being an able negotiator.”
Franklin mastered a three-dimensional game against two aggressive players by exhibiting great patience when the pieces were not properly aligned and carefully exploiting strategic advantages when they were.47
“The best interest of nations, like men, was to follow the dictates of conscience,”
“Both sides must part with some of their demands,”
“By absorbing the gentility of the aristocracy and the work of the working class, the middling sorts gained a powerful moral hegemony over the whole society,”
“Upon the whole, I am much disposed to like the world as I find it, and to doubt my own judgment as to what would mend it.”
