Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man…

The saying comes from Poor Richard’s Almanack, the yearly almanac Benjamin Franklin printed in Philadelphia. Wikisource gives the almanac’s sayings as one long alphabetical list, so here it sits between “Drunkenness, that worst of evils, makes some men fools, some beasts, some devils” and “Eat few suppers, and you’ll need few medicines.” Nearby, in the same vein: “Diligence is the mother of good luck.”

Franklin launched the almanac in 1732 under the name of Richard Saunders, a poor stargazer who claims to write it because his wife cannot bear to see him do nothing but gaze at the stars. Besides calendars, weather forecasts and tides, it filled its pages with short, memorable sayings, and it sold very well in the colonies for a quarter of a century.

Franklin never claimed to have invented them all. This rhyme was already an English proverb before his time; his almanac gave it new life, and it remains a byword for early risers.

Poor Richard's Almanack, 1735

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work