William Penn

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.

To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals – this alone is worth the struggle.

A true friend freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably.

Some men do as much begrudge others a good name, as they want one themselves: and perhaps that is the reason of it.

She is but half a wife that is not, nor is capable of being, a friend.

It is a severe Rebuke upon us, that God makes us so many Allowances, and we make so few to our Neighbor: As if Charity had nothing to do with Religion; Or Love with Faith, that ought to work by it.

I want to be all used up when I die.

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

Thought makes every thing fit for use.

Subdue your passion or it will subdue you.

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.

The only thing grief as taught me is to know how shallow it is.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.

When you’re drowning, you don’t say ‘I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me,’ you just scream.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

Men being born with a title to perfect freedom and uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature . . . no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political view of another, without his consent.