William Penn

Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.

If thou art clean and warm, it is sufficient; for more doth but rob the Poor, and please the Wanton.

Where charity keeps pace with grain, industry is blessed, but to slave to get, and keep it sordidly, is a sin against Providence, a vice in government and an injury to their neighbours.

Between a man and his wife nothing ought to rule but love. Authority is for children and servants, yet not without sweetness.

They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill, what never dies. Nor can Spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their Friendship. If Absence be not death, neither is theirs. Death is but Crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas; They live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is Omnipresent. In this Divine Glass, they see Face to Face; and their Converse is Free, as well as Pure. This is the Comfort of Friends, that though they may be said to Die, yet their Friendship and Society are, in the best Sense, ever present, because Immortal.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

Ah! Sir, a boy’s being flogged is not so severe as a man’s having the hiss of the world against him.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.

How you gonna win if you ain’t right within?

There is only one thing about which I shall have no regrets when my life ends. I have savored to the full all the small, daily joys. The bright sunshine on the breakfast table; the smell of the air at dusk; the sound of the clock ticking; the light rains that start gently after midnight; the hour when the family come home; Sunday-evening tea before the fire! I have never missed one moment of beauty, not even taken it for granted. Spring, summer, autumn, or winter. I wish I had failed as little in other ways.

Nothing is so exhilarating in life as to be shot at with no result.

That observation which is called knowledge of the world will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good.

Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.