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God helps them that help themselves, as Poor Richard says.

Benjamin Franklindisputed·Franklin's Way to Wealth; or, Poor Richard Improved·1758

Attribution contested

Quoted constantly as scripture. It is nowhere in the Bible, which says something close to the opposite in several places. Franklin printed it in Poor Richard's Almanack and gathered it here in 1758, but he did not coin it either: he presents it as an existing proverb, and versions of it appear in Algernon Sidney's Discourses in 1698 and, earlier still, in Aesop.