Benjamin Franklin printed “Lost Time is never found again” on the January page of his almanac Poor Richard Improved for 1748, and repeated it in the 1758 preface later known as The Way to Wealth. Like many Poor Richard sayings it may be a polished version of older wisdom, but no earlier source for this exact wording was found.
What it means
Time wasted is gone for good: unlike money or possessions, it cannot be recovered, so it should be used well now.
Where it comes from
The line stands alone among the short sayings on the January page of the 1748 almanac, after a comic verse about a dying husband and a quatrain about robbers. Franklin brought it back ten years later in Father Abraham’s speech, the 1758 preface: wasting time must be “the greatest Prodigality, since, as he elsewhere tells us, Lost Time is never found again; and what we call Time-enough, always proves little enough.”
Franklin did not claim to have invented his proverbs. In the same 1758 preface Poor Richard admits that not a tenth part of the wisdom was his own, “but rather the Gleanings I had made of the Sense of all Ages and Nations,” and the Franklin Papers editors describe him as more often editor than author. The thought itself is ancient — Virgil wrote “fugit inreparabile tempus” (time flies, never to be recovered) — but a search of Thomas Fuller’s 1732 proverb collection Gnomologia found only related sayings, not this one.