William Penn

He that lives to forever, never fears dying.

For death is no more than turning us over from time to eternity.

It is the amends of a short and troublesome life, that doing good and suffering ill entitles man to a longer and better

Wear none of thine own Chains; but keep free, whilst thou art free.

Fidelity has enfranchised slaves, and adopted servants to be sons.

Passion is the mob of the man, that commits a riot upon his reason.

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

Don’t be a hard rock when you really are a gem!

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

The wilderness is near as well as dear to every man. Even the oldest villages are indebted to the border of wild wood which surrounds them, more than to the gardens of men. There is something indescribably inspiriting and beautiful in the aspect of the forest skirting and occasionally jutting into the midst of new towns, which, like the sand-heaps of fresh fox-burrows, have sprung up in their midst. The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

Make a good use of the present.

Work is always an antidote to depression.

Big doors swing on little hinges.

A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.

Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.

I’ve never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.