Benjamin Franklin vividly remembered a visit he made as a young man to see the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather and the life lesson learned. Franklin recalled:
He was showing me out of the house, and there was a very low beam near the doorway. I was still talking when Mather began shouting, "Stoop! Stoop!" I didn't understand what he meant and banged my head on the beam. "You're young," he said, "and have the world before you. Stoop as you go through it, and you will avoid many hard thumps." That advice has been very useful to me. I avoided many misfortunes by not carrying my head too high in pride.