Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklinwas one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A renowned polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, freemason, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. As an inventor, he is known for the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, among other inventions. He facilitated many civic organizations, including...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth17 January 1706
CityBoston, MA
CountryUnited States of America
What signifies knowing the Names, if you know not the Natures of things.
Idleness is the Dead Sea that swallows all virtues. Be active in business, that temptation may miss her aim; the bird that sits is easily shot.
Keep flax from fire, and youth from gaming.
Getting into debt, is getting into a tanglesome net.
He that's content hath enough.
He that speaks ill of the mare will buy her.
There are no ugly loves nor handsome prisons.
I am about courting a girl I have had but little acquaintance with. How shall I come to a knowledge of her faults, and whether she has the virtues I imagine she has? Answer. Commend her among her female acquaintances.
Furnished as all Europe now is with Academies of Science, with nice instruments and the spirit of experiment, the progress of human knowledge will be rapid and discoveries made of which we have at present no conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the happiness of knowing what will be known a hundred years hence.
Singularity in the right hath ruined many; happy those who are convinced of the general opinion.
Many estates are spent in the getting, since women for tea forsake spinning and knitting, and men for punch forsake hewing and splitting.
The Golden Age was never the present age.
And we daily in our experiments electrise bodies plus or minus, as we think proper. [These terms we may use till your Philosophers give us better.] To electrise plus or minus, no more needs to be known than this, that the parts of the Tube or Sphere, that are rubb'd, do, in the Instant of Friction, attract the Electrical Fire, and therefore take it from the Thin rubbing; the same parts immediately, as the Friction upon them ceases, are disposed to give the fire they have received, to any Body that has less.
Trusting too much to others care is the ruin of many.