William Penn

The Humble, Meek, Merciful, Just, Pious and Devout Souls, are everywhere of one religion; and when Death has taken off the Mask, they will know one another, though the divers Liveries they wear here make them Strangers.

It is admirable to consider how many Millions of People come into, and go out of the World, Ignorant of themselves, and of the World they have lived in.

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

To be furious in religion is to be irreligiously religious.

Do Good with what thou hast, or it will do thee no good.

A wise man makes what he learns his own, the other shows he is but a copy or a collection at most.

If you develop rules, never have more than ten.

My dear friend, clear your mind of cant [excessive thought]. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, Sir, I am your most humble servant. You are not his most humble servant. You may say, These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times. You don’t mind the times … You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society; but don’t think foolishly.

For Wealth are all things that conduce, to one’s destruction or their use. A standard both to buy and sell, all things from heaven down to hell.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

Logic is like the sword

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

He that gives good advice builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example builds with both.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, — whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?

Every great man, every successful man, no matter what the field of endeavor, has known the magic that lies in these words: every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.

Ignorance… is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.