William Penn

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

Love grows. Lust wastes by Enjoyment, and the Reason is, that one springs from an Union of Souls, and the other from an Union of Sense.

Eat therefore to live, and do not live to eat.

As Love ought to bring them together, so it is the best Way to keep them well together.

To be furious in religion is to be irreligiously religious.

I will never do this, says one, yet does it: I am resolved to do this, says another; but flags upon second Thoughts: Or does it, tho’ awkwardly, for his Word’s sake: As if it were worse to break his Word, than to do amiss in keeping it.

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.

It is the false shame of fools to try to conceal wounds that have not healed.

Be not the slave of your own past – plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

If in doubt, don’t. If still in doubt, do what’s right.

Today is a king in disguise.

In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment and will never be more divine in the lapse of the ages. Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but when I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains.

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

One cause, which is not always observed, of the insufficiency of riches, is that they very seldom make their owner rich.

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.