William Penn

Nothing does reason more right, than the coolness of those that offer it: For Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of its opposers.

They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill, what never dies. Nor can Spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their Friendship. If Absence be not death, neither is theirs. 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.

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Moms. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.

Where Example keeps pace with Authority, Power hardly fails to be obey’d.

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.

I will never do this, says one, yet does it: I am resolved to do this, says another; but flags upon second Thoughts: Or does it, tho’ awkwardly, for his Word’s sake: As if it were worse to break his Word, than to do amiss in keeping it.

A man who has no office to go to – I don’t care who he is – is a trial of which you can have no conception.

Reading Proust isn’t just reading a book, it’s an experience and you can’t reject an experience.

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.

He that does good for good’s sake seeks neither paradise nor reward, but he is sure of both in the end.

God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.