Ikigai Daily
Menu
DriveQuote

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1734

Literature

The story behind the card

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), the Philadelphia printer, scientist and statesman, published Poor Richard's Almanack every year from 1732 to 1758 under the pen name Richard Saunders. Among its calendars and weather forecasts were short sayings, many of them older proverbs he sharpened. In the 1734 edition this one is a rhyming couplet: 'Take this remark from Richard poor and lame, / Whate'er's begun in anger ends in shame.' In 1753 he added that anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.

Türkçe oku
Öfkeyle başlayan her şey utançla biter.
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1734

Philadelphialı matbaacı, bilim insanı ve devlet adamı Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Poor Richard's Almanack'i (Zavallı Richard'ın Almanağı) 1732'den 1758'e kadar her yıl “Richard Saunders” takma adıyla yayımladı. Almanakta takvimlerin ve hava tahminlerinin arasında kısa özdeyişler de yer alırdı; bunların çoğu, Franklin'in daha vurucu hâle getirdiği eski atasözleriydi. Bu söz 1734 baskısında, “zavallı ve topal Richard”ın öğüdü olarak kafiyeli bir beyitte geçer. Franklin 1753'te, öfkenin hiçbir zaman sebepsiz olmadığını ama nadiren iyi bir sebebi olduğunu da yazdı. Türkçede aynı fikri “Öfkeyle kalkan zararla oturur” atasözü anlatır.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Poor Richard's Almanack
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

DriveLiterature

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.

'If—' is written as a father's advice to his son: a long chain of conditions that ends, 'you'll be a Man, my son!' Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), the author of The Jungle Book, published it in 1910 in Rewards and Fairies and said it was inspired by Leander Starr Jameson, leader of a failed raid in southern Africa in 1895–96. These two lines are written on the wall of the players' entrance to Centre Court at Wimbledon, and in a BBC poll in the 1990s the poem was voted Britain's favourite.

Rudyard Kipling, "If—" (1910)Read card
DriveLiterature

I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.

These are the last two lines of 'Invictus'. William Ernest Henley (1849–1903), an English poet and editor, lost his left leg below the knee to tuberculosis as a young man. From 1873 he was treated at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh by the surgeon Joseph Lister, who saved his other leg, and he wrote the poem there in 1875. It was published without a title in 1888; the Latin title, meaning 'unconquered', was added by an anthology editor in 1900. Nelson Mandela recited it to fellow prisoners on Robben Island.

W.E. Henley, "Invictus" (1875)Read card
DriveLiterature

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

No one has found this line in Franklin's writings. It was being printed as his by 1909, more than a century after his death, usually after another unverified line about a man who 'empties his purse into his head'. In 1989 the Library of Congress's dictionary of quotations, Respectfully Quoted, listed it as unverified. It suits him, though: Franklin left school at ten, taught himself by reading, and in 1731 helped found the Library Company of Philadelphia so that its members could share books.

Benjamin Franklin (attributed, 18th century)Read card
DriveLiterature

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.

This maxim opens Chapter 12 of Mark Twain's novel Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894). Each chapter begins with a saying from ‘Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar’, the joke almanac kept by David Wilson, a clever lawyer whom his Missouri town dismisses as a fool, or ‘pudd'nhead’. The entry goes on to say that calling a creature brave only makes sense if it is partly a coward: otherwise the flea, which attacks people asleep or awake whatever their size, would be the bravest animal alive. Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens (1835–1910).

Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)Read card
DrivePhilosophy

Men at some time are masters of their fates: / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Cassius speaks these lines in Act 1 of Julius Caesar, written by Shakespeare in 1599. He tells Brutus that nothing in the heavens made Caesar great and them his underlings: they allowed it. Many people then believed the stars shaped a person's fate. Today the line is quoted as a call to take charge of your life, and it gave John Green's novel The Fault in Our Stars its title. In the play it is flattery with a purpose: Cassius is drawing Brutus into the plot to kill Caesar.

William ShakespeareRead card
Next card in the archiveAn investment in knowledge pays the best interest.Read next →