William Penn

To be innocent is to be not guilty; but to be virtuous is to overcome our evil inclinations.

Liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery.

Covetousness is the greatest of monsters, as well as the root of all evil.

The Country is both the Philosopher’s Garden and his Library, in which he Reads and Contemplates the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God.

Have a care, therefore, where there is more sail than ballast.

He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father’s wisdom than he who has a great deal left to him owes to his father’s care.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

You’ll never have a quiet world until you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

No one ever became great by imitation.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial “we.”

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

As the Spanish proverb says, He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him. So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

Every man believes that he has greater possibilities.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision.

A man’s wife has more power over him than the state has.

Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.

Every old poem is sacred.