Ben & Me Quotes

“Great people - and I do believe Franklin was a great person - teach us by both positive example and negative. Object lessons are still lessons. Sometimes they are the most valuable of all.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“Solitude is underrated.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“Nowhere does [Benjamin Franklin] disappoint more, though, than when it comes to slavery.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“Dying, I realize, is nothing more or less than the ultimate test of trust. Do you trust in - call it what you like, God, the universe, nature, science - or do you not? It is that simple, though not at all easy.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“I reach the sad conclusion that at my age (older but not old), I will never learn to speak French, not even poorly. I will never climb Mt Everest or star in a Broadway play or en an off-off-Broadway one. I will never spelunk. A stanza from a poem by Donald Justice comes to mind: Men at forty/Learn to close softly/the doors to rooms they will not be/Coming back to. I am well past forty, and the doors are slamming shut so rapidly I am beginning to feel trapped.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“History is a series of flukes masquerading as inevitabilities. What today looks like a forgone conclusion was only one of many possible outcomes. For every path taken, there are dozens, hundreds, of alternative routes, enticing what-ifs.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“It frightens me. Death frightens me too, but old age frightens me more. Death - dying, to be more precise - is a finite experience. Nature ensures that it won’t take long (even if it feels interminable). Old age is another story. It can last a long time and, unlike dying, the rules are less clear. The dying are supposed to die. The old are supposed to … what? Get older? Pretend they are young? I don’t know what the correct answer is. I’m not sure anybody does.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“Chronometric age tells us nothing about a person. It tells us nothing about Ben Franklin who, at nearly seventy, was just getting started.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“Franklin was an odd fish but not a cold one.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“Reviewing a life that is still in progress means you still have time to make course corrections, large and small. Reviewing life is the first step towards improving it. You can’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“But if I’ve learned anything thus far, it’s that life lessons are sometimes written in invisible ink. They become legible only when exposed to the light.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“[Franklin] needed a miracle. He knew it would not come from heaven or himself. For Franklin, miracles always arrived in the form of other people.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“Three hundred years is a very long time, and no time at all.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“Some journeys change us on a molecular level, We depart one person and arrive another. I’d like to say it is magical, but that is not right. Something else is going on. The act of travel, of movement, doesn’t change us so much as solidify us. On the road, free from expectations, others and our own, pieces of ourselves, previously scattered fragments, click into place, and we are whole. This is what happened to Charles Darwin in the Galapagos, Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa, George Harrison on the banks of the Ganges. They all experienced what author Robert Grunion calls “the beauty of sudden seeing’.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“Time and chain stores have blurred the sharp differences that once distinguished American cities.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“As it has been observed, it is easier to deceive people than to convince them they’ve been deceived.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“Throughout his life, Franklin argued for a woman’s right to a proper education, even if he denied such an education to his own daughter. Franklin was many things. Consistent was not one of them.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“Life is best understood backward but must be lived forward, observed the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Maybe we would trust providence more if we could watch our lives in reverse, like a home movie played backward. Maybe providence is always working in our favor, but we’re too close to appreciate it. Only time provides the distance needed to admire its handiwork.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life