This seems to have been first attributed to Franklin in The New Age Magazine Vol. 66 (1958), and the earliest appearance of it yet located is in Coronet magazine, Vol. 34 (1953), p. 27, where it was attributed to a Louise Stein; it thus seems likely to have been derived from an earlier statement of Harry Emerson Fosdick, On Being a Real Person (1943) : "At very best, a person wrapped up in himself makes a small package".
Misattributed
“A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel.”
“At very best, a person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.”
A very similar statement has become attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but apparently only in recent decades: "A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle." This seems to have been first attributed to Franklin in The New Age Magazine Vol. 66 (1958), and the earliest appearance of it yet located is in Coronet magazine, Vol. 34 (1953), p. 27, where it was attributed to a Louise Stein.
On Being a Real Person (1943)
“I am nothing but a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man.”
Volume II [Tauchnitz,
Source: The Woman in White (1859)
Bell Telephone Talk (1901)
Whoops! It's Christmas (1959)
Context: The central core of truth is that Christmas turns everything upside down, the upside of heaven come down to earth. The Christmas story puts a new value on every man. He is not a thing to be used, not a chemical accident, not an educated ape. Every man is a V. I. P., because he has divine worth. That was revealed when "Love came down at Christmas." A scientist said, making a plea for exchange scholarships between nations, "The best way to send an idea is to wrap it up in a person." That was what happened at Christmas. The idea of divine love was wrapped up in a person.
“He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”
The Finest Story in the World http://www.telelib.com/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/ManyInventions/fineststory.html (1893).
Other works
Source: Many Inventions
Context: When next he came to me he was drunk—royally drunk on many poets for the first time revealed to him. His pupils were dilated, his words tumbled over each other, and he wrapped himself in quotations—as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors.
“What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.”
“A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.”
“A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.”
History
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Essays, First Series
