William Penn

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers.

True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.

All excess is ill, but drunkenness is of the worst sort. It spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous and bad.

Nothing does Reason more Right, than the Coolness of those that offer it: for Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.

True godliness does not turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it.

Sense shines with a double luster when it is set in humility. An able yet humble man is a jewel worth a kingdom.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness – an open and noble temper.

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.

Pity is for living, envy is for dead.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are the richest.

To hazard much to get much has more of avarice than wisdom.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted… but to weigh and consider.

I think there is something, more important than believing: Action! The world is full of dreamers, there aren’t enough who will move ahead and begin to take concrete steps to actualize their vision.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Friends… they cherish one another’s hopes. They are kind to one another’s dreams.

It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.