He that can have patience can have what he will.
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was one of the founders of the United States, and also a printer, inventor and scientist. Alongside political work he experimented with electricity, founded the first public library in America, and for years published Poor Richard's Almanack, a collection of practical advice and sayings that passed into everyday speech.
About this theme: Patience
Patience fares badly in an age measured in loading times. Yet nearly every tradition that wrote about it separates two things everyday speech runs together: waiting and enduring. The first is passive; the second is not. The Latin patientia comes from a verb meaning to suffer or bear — something actively carried, not an idle interval.
More by Benjamin Franklin
More on Patience
- Drop by drop is the water pot filled.— Buddha
- Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.— Ovid
- He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk.— Friedrich Nietzsche
- Grain by grain a loaf, stone by stone a palace.— Croatian Proverb
- I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.— Marie Curie