William Penn

If we are but sure the end is right, we are too apt to gallop over all bounds to compass it; not considering the lawful ends may be very unlawfully attained.

Liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery.

Where charity keeps pace with grain, industry is blessed, but to slave to get, and keep it sordidly, is a sin against Providence, a vice in government and an injury to their neighbours.

A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil that good may come of it.

True godliness does not turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it.

The country life is to be preferred, for there we see the works of God; but in cities little else but the works of men. And the one makes a better subject for contemplation than the other.

There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.

Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

There is always room for a person of force and they make room for many.

Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and the water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.

The human soul, by once suffering as much as it is capable of, purchases a strange and terrible immunity to all the rest of life’s sorrows.

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing –to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.