Benjamin Franklin. “Well done is better than well said” is printed, in exactly those words, on the May page of Poor Richard, 1737, the almanac Franklin wrote under the pen name Richard Saunders and printed in Philadelphia. It is usually credited to “Poor Richard’s Almanack” without a year; 1737 is the edition it appears in.
What it means
Doing a thing well counts for more than talking well about it. Promises, plans and fine speeches cost little; the finished deed is what changes anything, and what people remember.
Where it comes from
1737 was Poor Richard’s fifth year. Each month’s page of the almanac carried a short verse and a few sayings, and this one opens the sayings for May, headed “III Mon. May hath xxxi days” because the old calendar still counted March as the first month. It follows a verse about the miser Rich Gripe and the spendthrift Poor Shifter, and comes just before “Fine linnen, girls and gold so bright, Chuse not to take by candle-light.” The Papers of Benjamin Franklin print the almanac from the copy at Yale University Library.
Franklin never claimed his proverbs were all original. In the preface to the 1758 almanac, later known as The Way to Wealth, Poor Richard admits that “not a tenth Part of the Wisdom was my own,” but “the Gleanings I had made of the Sense of all Ages and Nations.” So the thought may be older. But a search of Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia (1732), the large English proverb collection of the day, found sayings about words and deeds and not this one, and we found no earlier printing of this wording. Its first known appearance is Franklin’s almanac for 1737.