William Penn

God is better served in resisting a Temptation to Evil, than in many formal Prayers.

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

Covetousness is the greatest of monsters, as well as the root of all evil.

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

Rarely promise, but, if lawful, constantly perform.

Children, Fear God; that is to say, have an holy awe upon your minds to avoid that which is evil, and a strict care to embrace and do that which is good.

Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.

It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.

Men are respectable only as they respect.

Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.

Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.

Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of their soul.

The avarice person is ever in want; let your desired aim have a fixed limit.

The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions.

Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.

He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again – and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s and each obeying its own law.

There be three things which make a nation great and prosperous: a fertile soil, busy workshops, easy conveyance for men and goods from place to place.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.