He that can have patience can have what he will.

The maxim comes from Poor Richard’s Almanack, which Franklin printed in Philadelphia every year from 1733 to 1758 under the name of Richard Saunders, slipping proverbs between the calendars and the weather. The Wikisource text arranges them alphabetically; this one stands in a long run beginning “He that”, just after “He that can compose himself, is wiser than he that composes books” and before “He that cannot bear with other people’s passions, cannot govern his own”.

Franklin took many of his sayings from earlier collections of proverbs, trimming them until they were memorable; they were, he said, the gleanings of “the sense of all ages and nations”. Patience is one of the almanac’s constant themes, because Poor Richard is written for people who must get on in the world with little capital but time.

The line has a hard edge that softer versions lose: patience is not resignation but a way of getting what one wants. “Haste makes waste”, another of the almanac’s best-known lines, stands a little earlier in the same list.

Poor Richard’s Almanack

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