William Penn

You are now fixed at the mercy of no governor that comes to make his fortune great; you shall be governed by laws of your own making and live a free, and if you will, a sober and industrious life. I shall not usurp the right of any, or oppress his person. God has furnished me with a better resolution and has given me his grace to keep it.

We are apt to love praise, but not deserve it. But if we would deserve it, we must love virtue more than that.

Those who would mend the world must first mend themselves.

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

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

If thou rise with an Appetite, thou art sure never to sit down without one.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds – not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but – a hatred of all injury.

An index is a great leveller.

Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.

I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich, something for nothing.

There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.

Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.

Don’t think of yourself as indispensable or infallible. As Charles De Gaulle said, the cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.

Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

Do something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

Adam was but human-this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

The more you know the less you understand.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

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