Life & Mortality Quote by Benjamin Franklin

Franklin’s genius was never mystical; it was managerial. This line reads like a pocket-sized operating system for a society trying to square ambition with mortality. “Work as if you were to live a hundred years” is a rebuke to feverish, short-term opportunism. It argues for institutions, habits, and crafts built to last: savings, civic projects, reputations carefully tended. Franklin came of age in a world where colonies were becoming a country, where printing presses and postal routes mattered, where “the long run” wasn’t a slogan but a fragile experiment in self-government.

Then the sentence snaps shut: “Pray as if you were to die tomorrow.” Franklin isn’t pivoting from Enlightenment practicality to pious panic; he’s staging a productive tension. The subtext is accountability. You can plan like a builder and still live like a debtor to time. By putting work and prayer side by side, he keeps both from becoming alibis: work can’t excuse moral laziness, and prayer can’t launder neglect of the world.

Context matters. Franklin’s religion was famously pragmatic, closer to civic virtue than doctrinal fire. So “pray” functions as a shorthand for ethical inventory, humility, and readiness - the inner life that prevents industriousness from curdling into self-worship. It’s also politically useful: a public language legible to believers, while quietly advancing an Enlightenment ethic of disciplined self-making.

The line endures because it refuses the false choice between legacy and urgency. It tells you to build for a century while acting like you have only tonight to answer for it.