William Penn

Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope.

Religion is nothing else but love of God and man.

A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil that good may come of it.

To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as mortals.

If thou wouldn’t conquer thy weakness thou must not gratify it.

To hazard much to get much has more of avarice than wisdom.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

Labor diligently to increase your property.

He was doing missionary work. But from the outset he had little success in convincing his charges of their responsibility for a sin committed at the beginning of creation, one which, as they understood it, they were ready and capable (indeed, they carried charms to assure it) of duplicating themselves. He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correctly, regarded as “rank presumption”.

We love and lose in China, we weep on England’s moors, and laugh and moan in Guinea, and thrive on Spanish shores. We seek success in Finland, are born and die in Maine. In minor ways we differ, in major we’re the same.

Why is that others have so much faith in me, while I have so little? Why can’t I have the same belief in me that they have? Why can’t I see in myself, what they do? What is it that makes me, hold myself back? How many more hurdles do I need to overcome? There are so many questions that I have to find the answers to. And I will only find them by focusing and being completely honest with myself.

It the proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

The stars are the apexes of what triangles!

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

They must first judge themselves, that presume to censure others: And such will not be apt to overshoot the Mark. We are too ready to retaliate, rather than forgive, or gain by Love and Information. And yet we could hurt no Man that we believe loves us. Let us then try what Love will do: For if Men did once see we Love them, we should soon find they would not harm us. Force may subdue, but Love gains: And he that forgives first, wins the [Laurel]. If I am even with my Enemy, the Debt is paid; but if I forgive it, I oblige him for ever.

It is the nature of babies to be in bliss.

I think I have a good deal of my Uncle Theodore in me, because I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on.

Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance.