There are no gains without pains.

In The Way to Wealth, a crowd at an auction asks old Father Abraham what he thinks of the times and their heavy taxes, and he answers with the sayings of Poor Richard. He has just recalled that “Lost time is never found again”. Wishing for better times is useless: “We may make these times better if we bestir ourselves.” Then come “He that lives upon hope will die fasting”, the line, and its companion: “Help hands, for I have no lands.”

Franklin wrote the piece in 1757 as the preface to his almanac for 1758. At the end, the listeners approve the doctrine and go off to buy extravagantly, “just as if it had been a common sermon”; and Richard admits that most of the wisdom was “the gleanings I had made of the sense of all ages and nations”.

The rhyme was older than Franklin: “No pains, no gains” was already an English proverb in the seventeenth century. Its modern descendant, “no pain, no gain”, has become a slogan of the gym.

The Way to Wealth, 1758

Checked word for word in the work itself.

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