Benjamin Franklin

while on a visit to his friend,

I re­mem­ber his be­ing dis­suaded by some of his friends from the un­der­tak­ing, as not likely to suc­ceed, one news­pa­per be­ing, in their judg­ment, enough for Amer­ica.

man be­ing some­times more gen­er­ous when he has but a little money than when he has plenty, per­haps through fear of be­ing thought to have but little.

the task should be a ver­sion of the eight­eenth Psalm, which de­scribes the des­cent of a Deity.

one man of tol­er­able abil­it­ies may work great changes, and ac­com­plish great af­fairs among man­kind, if he first forms a good plan, and, cut­ting off all amuse­ments or other em­ploy­ments that would di­vert his at­ten­tion, makes the ex­e­cu­tion of that same plan his sole study and busi­ness.

I en­ter­tained an opin­ion that, though cer­tain ac­tions might not be bad be­cause they were for­bid­den by it, or good be­cause it com­manded them, yet prob­ably these ac­tions might be for­bid­den be­cause they were bad for us, or com­manded be­cause they were be­ne­fi­cial to us, in their own natures, all the cir­cum­stances of things con­sidered.

Tho­mas God­frey, a self-taught math­em­atician, great in his way, and af­ter­ward in­ventor of what is now called Had­ley’s Quad­rant. But he knew little out of his way, and was not a pleas­ing com­pan­ion; as, like most great math­em­aticians I have met with, he ex­pec­ted uni­ver­sal pre­ci­sion in everything said, or was forever deny­ing or dis­tin­guish­ing upon trifles, to the dis­turb­ance of all con­ver­sa­tion. He soon left us

He per­fec­ted the Al­bany Plan of Union for the colon­ies. He is the only states­man who signed the De­clar­a­tion of Independ­ence, the Treaty of Al­liance with France, the Treaty of Peace with Eng­land, and the Con­sti­tu­tion. As a writer, he has pro­duced, in his Auto­bi­o­graphy and in Poor Richard’s Al­manac, two works that are not sur­passed by sim­ilar writ­ing. He re­ceived hon­or­ary de­grees from Har­vard and Yale, from Ox­ford and St. Andrews, and was made a fel­low of the Royal So­ci­ety, which awar­ded him the Copley gold medal for im­prov­ing nat­ural know­ledge. He was one of the eight for­eign as­so­ci­ates of the French Academy of Science

e was nat­ur­ally more elo­quent, had a ready plenty of words, and some­times, as I thought, bore me down more by his flu­ency than by the strength of his reas­ons.

Men should be taught as if you taught them not,
And things un­known pro­posed as things for­got;”