William Penn

Religion is nothing else but love of God and man.

Believe nothing against another but on good authority; and never report what may hurt another, unless it be a greater hurt to some other to conceal it.

My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot; for I owe my conscience to no mortal man.

Never marry but for love; but see that thou lovest what is lovely.

Right is right even if everyone is against it and wrong is wrong even if everyone is for it.

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.

Character is just another word for having a perfectly disciplined and educated will.

The memory of a day like today reminds me to hold the ones I love that much tighter, that much longer… Take that much more time to be present and to feel the blessing of another day…

Principles aren’t of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.

All say, How hard it is that we have to die – a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

To keep your secret is wisdom, but to expect others to keep it is folly.

Be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost, must always end in pain.

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.

The Pause; that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, however so felicitous, could accomplish it.

You are alive, so be fully alive.

An awareness of our past is essential to the establishment of our personality and our identity as Africans.

For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.