Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

He that can have patience can have what he will

Written by Benjamin Franklin 1706–1790 · printer of Poor Richard’s Almanack
Verified Free to reuse

Franklin printed this as a calendar maxim in Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1736 — the Yale Papers of Benjamin Franklin text at Founders Online ↗ carries it on the June calendar page. The wording he set in type was “He that can have Patience, can have what he will”; the widely circulated “He who…” version is a later drift.

Last verified 4 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Verified quote & credit

“He that can have patience can have what he will” Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack (1736) — "He that can have Patience, can have what he will."

Can you use it?

Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Benjamin Franklin — American printer, scientist and statesman. Theme: "He that can have patience can have what he will". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "He that can have patience can have what he will". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where the line actually appears

Work
Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1736
Placement
Calendar maxim on the June page (“IV Mon. June hath xxx days”)
Author
Benjamin Franklin, writing as “Richard Saunders”
As printed
“He that can have Patience, can have what he will.”

He that buys by the penny, maintains not only himself, but other people.
He that can have Patience, can have what he will.
Now I’ve a sheep and a cow, every body bids me good morrow. Poor Richard, 1736

Three maxims as they run in the 1736 almanac: the first closes the May calendar page, the next two open June’s. Poor Richard’s sayings were set one to a line in the narrow margins of the calendar, so there is no surrounding paragraph — the neighbours are the context.

Poor Richard, 1736 — full almanac text at Founders Online

How we verified this

  • The almanac itself, as edited in the Yale Papers of Benjamin Franklin and published in full at Founders Online ↗, carries the line on the June calendar page — under the heading “IV Mon. June hath xxx days”, just after “He that buys by the penny…” closes May.
  • Wikiquote’s year-by-year list of Poor Richard maxims ↗ places “He that can have Patience, can have what he will” among the 1736 entries.
  • Wikiquote’s Patience page ↗ narrows it further, citing Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, June 1736.
  • A 1914 public-domain selection of Franklin’s sayings, digitised by the Internet Archive ↗, carries the line at numbered entry 210 — modernised to “He that can have patience can have what he will.”, without the 1736 capital and comma. It is alphabetised and undated, so it witnesses the saying, not the 1736 page.
  • On how much of Poor Richard was Franklin’s own, Wikipedia quotes Jill Lepore ↗: he wrote perhaps one proverb in ten and found the rest in books, especially Thomas Fuller’s 1732 Gnomologia.
Public domain

Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1736 was printed and sold in Philadelphia in the closing months of 1735 — almanacs went on sale the year before the one they covered — and the reprint cited alongside it appeared in 1914. Both are far earlier than the 1931 US public-domain cutoff. The text is free to quote, reproduce and adapt without permission.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What travels wrong

The attribution to Franklin holds up — the line really is in his almanac. Two smaller things go astray anyway: the wording, and the assumption that printing a proverb is the same as inventing one.

“He who can have patience…” modern drift

Franklin set “He that can have Patience, can have what he will.” The who variant is the one that spread through user-submitted quote sites — Goodreads carries it with no source at all ↗, under a notice that its quotes are community-added and unverified.

Quote aggregators no citation

Even the aggregators that get the wording right usually strip the provenance: BrainyQuote prints the correct “He that” text ↗ with Franklin’s life dates but names no work and no year, leaving nothing a reader can check.

Franklin as the originator compiler, not always author

Printing it in 1736 does not mean he coined it. Franklin admitted “not a tenth Part of the Wisdom was my own” ↗, and Wikipedia quotes Jill Lepore to the effect that he took most of Poor Richard’s proverbs from anthologies such as Thomas Fuller’s 1732 Gnomologia ↗. No earlier printed source for this particular line turned up in the sources consulted here.

Documented: Benjamin Franklin printed “He that can have Patience, can have what he will” in Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1736 ↗. Undocumented: that he was the first to say it.

Context

Why a one-line proverb was worth printing

Poor Richard’s Almanack was not a quote book. It was a working calendar — moon phases, tide tables, weather guesses — and Franklin used the blank slivers beside the dates to slip in maxims. A line had to earn its place by being short enough to fit and sharp enough to be remembered, which is why so much of Franklin’s reputation as a sage rests on sentences of a dozen words. This is one of them: patience reframed not as endurance but as leverage.

The almanac ran for a quarter-century — issues for 1733 through 1758 — and sold as many as 10,000 copies a year across the colonies. That reach is why a passing proverb from a 1736 calendar page is still printed on posters today — and also why its authorship gets flattened. Anything Poor Richard said, Franklin gets credited with.

“not a tenth Part of the Wisdom was my own which he ascribed to me”

Franklin on his own borrowing

In the preface to the final almanac — the piece later famous as The Way to Wealth — Franklin has Poor Richard listen to an old man quoting him back at himself, and admits that “not a tenth Part of the Wisdom was my own which he ascribed to me” ↗. Historians take him at his word: Wikipedia quotes Jill Lepore noting that Franklin found most of the proverbs in anthologies, especially Thomas Fuller’s 1732 Gnomologia ↗, and that his real gift was compression — turning Fuller’s “A Man in Passion rides a horse that runs away with him” into “A Man in a Passion rides a mad Horse.”

For this particular maxim, none of the sources consulted here documents an earlier printed appearance. That is an absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence: given Franklin’s habits, an older English proverb behind it would be no surprise — but no one has produced one.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Resilience Wisdom Success

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Poor Richard, 1736 — the almanac in fullfounders.archives.gov

The Yale Papers of Benjamin Franklin text, laid out month by month: the line sits on the June page, below that month’s calendar verse.
Poor Richard’s Almanack — sourced maxims by yearen.wikiquote.org

Lists the maxim among the 1736 entries. Wikiquote traces several Poor Richard lines from other years (1734, 1737) to Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia (1732) — but attaches no such note to any 1736 entry, including this one.
Wikiquote: Patienceen.wikiquote.org

Cites the line to Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, June 1736 — a secondary index that agrees with the almanac text.
Franklin’s sayings — 1914 U.S.C. selectionarchive.org

An abridged, alphabetised 1914 selection of the proverbs — not the text of any one almanac. Carries the line at no. 210, in modernised spelling.
Poor Richard’s Almanack — publication historyen.wikipedia.org

The Richard Saunders pseudonym, the 1732–1758 run, and Jill Lepore on how little of the proverb stock Franklin actually wrote.
The Way to Wealth — preface to the last almanacteachingamericanhistory.org

Franklin’s own admission that not a tenth part of Poor Richard’s wisdom was his; text from the Yale Papers of Benjamin Franklin.
WIST Quotations — Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1736)wist.info

An independently curated quotation index that also assigns the line to the 1736 almanac.

The man behind Poor Richard

Who was Benjamin Franklin?

Benjamin Franklin

1706–1790 · American printer, scientist and statesman

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was a Philadelphia printer who became one of the most consequential Americans of his century — scientist, diplomat, and signer of the Declaration of Independence. From 1732 to 1758 he wrote, compiled and printed Poor Richard’s Almanack under the pen name Richard Saunders, filling its calendar margins with the terse maxims that made him the most quoted American of the age. He was candid that the wisdom was not all his: by his own reckoning he wrote perhaps one proverb in ten, and gleaned the rest from earlier books.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Franklin, Benjamin [as “Richard Saunders”]. Poor Richard, 1736: An Almanack for the Year of Christ 1736. Philadelphia: printed and sold by B. Franklin, maxim on the June page. Text as edited in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 136–145; online at Founders Online. The line also appears, modernised and undated, in Poor Richard’s Almanack: Selections from the Apothegms and Proverbs (Waterloo, IA: The U.S.C. Publishing Co., 1914), no. 210.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘He that can have patience can have what he will’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/he-that-can-have-patience-can-have-what-he-will/

Something wrong on this page?

Tell us what’s off. A link helps but isn’t required — “this is the wrong person” is a useful report on its own. Nothing here changes the page directly; it goes to our review queue and a human checks it.

Only used to tell you if we act on your report. We never sell or share it.

Copied