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Who really said it

Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well

Written by Mark Twain 1835–1910 · American author and humorist; written when he was 34
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Twain coined it as a mock “Benjamin Franklin” maxim to open his satirical essay “The Late Benjamin Franklin” ↗ in The Galaxy (July 1870), signing it “B. F.” His original reads “what you can do day after to-morrow”; the widely quoted “what may be done” is a later refinement of the same line.

Last verified 7 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well” Mark Twain, "The Late Benjamin Franklin," The Galaxy, July 1870 — a satirical fake-Franklin maxim, signed "B. F."

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Provenance

Where it really comes from

Work
“The Late Benjamin Franklin”
Published in
The Galaxy, “Memoranda” department (July 1870)
Author
Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens)
Form
Satirical epigraph, jokingly signed “B. F.”

Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow just as well.—B. F. ↑ Twain’s original wording — the popular version swaps in “what may be done”

Twain opened the essay with this fake Franklin aphorism and then mock-lamented how Franklin’s “maxims” had tortured generations of boys. The “B. F.” signature is the joke: the sentiment is the exact opposite of Franklin’s real thrift-and-industry counsel.

Read the full 1870 essay “The Late Benjamin Franklin”

The paper trail

Public domain

The 1870 text is in the public domain in the United States (published well before 1929).

Fact-check

Who it’s wrongly credited to

Because Twain signed his joke “B. F.,” the line is sometimes repeated as if Benjamin Franklin actually wrote it — and a mid-century biography handed it to Oscar Wilde.

Benjamin Franklin

Twain invented the maxim and signed it “B. F.” as satire; it is the reverse of Franklin’s real thrift-and-diligence counsel. Franklin never wrote it — per Quote Investigator ↗, the phrasing was Twain’s 1870 parody of Franklin.

Oscar Wilde rare

Hesketh Pearson’s 1946 biography of Wilde presented the quip as Wilde’s, but no instance predating that book has been found ↗ — and Twain’s printed version predates Wilde’s writing career.

The words are genuinely Mark Twain’s, first printed in “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” The Galaxy, July 1870 ↗.

Context

Why it caught on

The joke works because it wears the costume of a real proverb. The straight maxim — “Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day” — was already a household scold, popularized in the Earl of Chesterfield’s letters to his son (written from 1737, published 1774). Twain simply pushed the timeline one day further and let procrastination win.

Attaching it to “B. F.” sharpened the satire: Benjamin Franklin was the patron saint of American industriousness, so a lazy maxim in his name was a small act of literary vandalism — and exactly the kind of thing Twain built a career on.

Twain didn’t misquote Franklin. He forged him — on purpose, for laughs.

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Filed under

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

Time Work

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.

Quote Investigator: full origin analysisquoteinvestigator.com

Traces the line to Twain’s 1870 Galaxy essay, the Chesterfield source of the straight proverb, and debunks the Oscar Wilde claim.
“The Late Benjamin Franklin” — full essay textcrummy.com

The complete 1870 essay, opening with the epigraph signed “B. F.”
WIST citation record for the epigraphwist.info

Sourced quotation record citing “Memoranda: The Late Benjamin Franklin,” The Galaxy, July 1870.
“The Late Benjamin Franklin” at American Literatureamericanliterature.com

Another archived full text of the essay for cross-checking the epigraph.
Mark Twain — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Sourced Twain quotations, including material from the 1870 Franklin essay.

The true author

About Mark Twain

Mark Twain

1835–1910 · American author, humorist and lecturer

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), the American humorist and novelist behind The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A relentless parodist of Victorian self-improvement piety, he loved to invert earnest maxims — here targeting the near-sacred aphorisms of Benjamin Franklin. The upside-down proverb is characteristic Twain: it reads like folk wisdom while gently mocking the whole genre of it.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Twain, Mark. “Memoranda: The Late Benjamin Franklin.” The Galaxy, vol. 10, July 1870.

MLA (9th ed.)

Twain, Mark. “Memoranda: The Late Benjamin Franklin.” The Galaxy, vol. 10, July 1870.

APA (7th ed.)

Twain, M. (1870, July). Memoranda: The late Benjamin Franklin. The Galaxy, 10.

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