I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our slipping; and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct.
The context
In his twenties, Franklin “conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.” He wanted to live without committing any fault at any time, and since he knew, or thought he knew, right from wrong, he “did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other.” It didn’t work. “While my care was employ’d in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason.” This sentence is his conclusion.
So he built a method. He listed thirteen virtues, each with a one-line rule; the fourth was “Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.” Rather than attempt them all at once, he gave “a week’s strict attention to each of the virtues successively,” marking every evening, in a little book, the faults of the day, “like him who, having a garden to weed, does not attempt to eradicate all the bad herbs at once.” He was, he wrote, “surpris’d to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined; but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish.”
Why it matters
Franklin’s starting point is one most of us share: if I know what’s right, surely I can just do it. His honest finding is that knowing isn’t enough, because habit works while attention is elsewhere. The answer isn’t to try harder in general. It’s to work on one habit at a time, and to check every day.
He didn’t claim to have succeeded. In old age he admitted he was still “incorrigible with respect to Order,” and that he “never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining.” But, he wrote, “I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.” That is a more useful kind of discipline than willpower: a system that keeps working on the days willpower doesn’t.
About Benjamin Franklin
American printer, writer, scientist and statesman, 1706–1790
Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on 17 January 1706. At 12 he was apprenticed to his brother James, a printer, and at 17 he ran away to Philadelphia to start again. From the age of 23 he published The Pennsylvania Gazette, and he wrote Poor Richard’s Almanack under the name “Richard Saunders”. His studies of electricity made him a major figure of the American Enlightenment, and his inventions include the lightning rod.
He was the only person to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris with Britain and the Constitution, and he was the first United States ambassador to France. He began his Autobiography in England in 1771, took it up again in France in 1784 and in Philadelphia in 1788, and stopped with the story at 1757. He died in Philadelphia on 17 April 1790, at 84.
The source, and how we checked it
It comes from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (this part written at Passy, France), 1784.
We matched the quote word for word against the Project Gutenberg text of Frank Woodworth Pine's 1916 edition, in the chapter "Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection". A note in that edition marks the passage as "written at Passy, 1784", decades after the events it describes, and an editor's note dates Franklin's "little book" of virtues to 1 July 1733. We last checked this on 30 October 2026.