William Penn

Force may subdue, but love gains, and he that forgives first wins the laurel.

If there be three distinct and separate Persons, then three distinct and separate Substances. . . . And since the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God . . . then unless the Father, Son and Spirit are three distinct Nothings, they must be three distinct Substances, and consequently three distinct Gods.

All Excess is ill: But Drunkenness is of the worst Sort. It spoils Health, dismounts the Mind, and unmans Men: It reveals Secrets, is Quarrelsome, Lascivious, Impudent, Dangerous and Mad. In fine, he that is drunk is not a Man: Because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast.

Have wholesome, but not costly Food, and be rather cleanly than dainty in ordering it.

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

Humility and knowledge in poor clothes excel pride and ignorance in costly attire.

I am easily satisfied with the very best.

It all depends on you. You can go on sleeping forever, you can wake up right this moment.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.

The eagle has ceased to scream, but the parrots will now begin to chatter. The war of the giants is over and the pigmies will now start to squabble.

The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.

We mustn’t be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.

Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

And deep in my heart. The answer, it was in me. And I made up my mind. To define my own destiny.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.

Do the wise thing and the kind thing too, and make the best of us and not the worst.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.