3 quotations linked to Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by or associated with Benjamin Franklin, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Character, habit, self-improvement, pride, humility, communication, work, civic life and Franklin’s deliberately imperfect virtue project.
Dates represented in this collection: 1791 · 1771–1790 composition. Individual quotation notes provide the most specific context for a passage.
Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or edition.
“From a child I was fond of reading.”
Franklin identifies reading as an early habit that shaped his self-education, curiosity, writing, and later public life.
Source note: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin; Franklin recalls spending his small amounts of money on books as a child.
“Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.”
Resolution becomes useful only when followed by execution; the maxim links deliberate standards with the habit of carrying them through.
Source note: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin; this is Franklin’s fourth listed virtue, Resolution.
“In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride.”
Franklin treats humility as a continuing discipline rather than a completed achievement: pride is difficult precisely because it can survive attempts to suppress it and can even attach itself to the appearance of modesty.
Source note: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Project Gutenberg #148. The sentence appears in Franklin’s discussion of adding Humility to his thirteen virtues after a Quaker friend convinced him that his argumentative manner often appeared proud and overbearing.