William Penn

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

Religion is nothing else but love of God and man.

Sense shines with a double luster when it is set in humility. An able yet humble man is a jewel worth a kingdom.

The jealous are troublesome to others, but torment to themselves.

Private men, in fine, are so much their own, that, paying common dues, they are sovereigns of all the rest. Yet the public must and will be served; and they that do it well, deserve public marks of honour and respect. To do so, men must have public minds, as well as salaries; or they will serve private ends at the public cost. Government can never be well administered, but where those intrusted make conscience of well discharging their places.

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.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change thing I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love.

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.

I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

Insurrection is an art, and like all arts has its own laws.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.

A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it.

What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.

Use every distraction as an object of meditation and they cease to be distractions.

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything for us to do.