Benjamin Franklin Quotes

One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

Who is this god person anyway?

The idea of feeling old is much more the worry of a slightly younger person. When you are getting old, that becomes - psssh - completely secondary to the absolute understanding of how short your life is.

The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore

I used to think my father was an idiot, until I turned twenty-one... Then I thought he was a genus.

If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.

There is only one calamity: ignorance. And there is only one solution: enlightenment.

To the ignorant, even the words of wise seem foolishness.

Wisdom is only found in truth.

The only death I fear is dying ignorant.

It's a fact that people are afraid of what they don't understand. And most are too lazy or ignorant to find out more.

A few drops of science will often disinfect an entire barrel full of ignorance and prejudice.

Do not mathematics and all sciences seem full of contradictions and impossibilities to the ignorant, which are all resolved and cleared to those that understand them?

If to take up books were to take them in, and if to see them were to consider them, and to run through them were to grasp them, I should be wrong to make myself out quite as ignorant as I say I am.

One should be gentle with the ignorant, for they are the chosen of God.

He that has seen both sides of fifty has lived to little purpose if he has no other views of the world than he had when he was much younger.

The older I get, the smarter my father seems to get.

It is possible to reason out the existence of God to a limited extent.

I have a lot of time for young people.

What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable.

If you have life in you, you have access to the secrets of the ages, for the truth of the universe resides in each and every human being.

The man of wisdom is the man of years.

...if a man comes to his fortieth year, and has any understanding at all, he has virtually seen - thanks to their similarity - all possible happenings, both past and to come.

Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.