Benjamin Franklin

Spinoza Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.

It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.

There never was a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.

There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry.

Each year one vicious habit discarded, in time might make the worst of us good.

Take time for all things; great haste makes great waste.

In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.

He that waits upon fortune, is never sure of a dinner.

Nothing preaches better than the act.

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

The world is full of fools and faint hearts; and yet everyone has courage enough to bear the misfortunes, and wisdom enough to manage the affairs of his neighbor.

Energy and persistence alter all things.

Nothing is more fatal to health than an over care of it.

There are three faithful friends, an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.

In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.

Honesty is the best policy.

Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.

Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.

He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.

A benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance.

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Happiness consists more in small conveniences of pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to a man in the course of his life.

Most fools think they are only ignorant.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

There are two ways of being happy: We must either diminish our wants or augment our means -- either may do -- the result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier.

Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.

Experience keeps a school, yet fools will learn in no other.

Most people return small favors, acknowledge medium ones and repay greater ones -- with ingratitude.

When I reflect, as I frequently do, upon the felicity I have enjoyed, I sometimes say to myself, that were the offer made me, I would engage to run again, from beginning to end, the same career of life. All I would ask, should be the privilege of an author, to correct in a second edition, certain errors of the first.

One should eat to live, not live to eat.