William Penn

A private Life is to be preferred; the Honor and Gain of publick Posts, bearing no proportion with the Comfort of it

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

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

Rarely promise, but, if lawful, constantly perform.

I know no religion that destroys courtesy, civility, and kindness.

Friendship is the next Pleasure we may hope for: And where we find it not at home, or have no home to find it in, we may seek it abroad. It is an Union of Spirits, a Marriage of Hearts, and the Bond thereof Vertue.

It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. As when astronomers call the lately discovered planet Neptune; or the asteroid Astr.

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.

The way to do well is to do well.

The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.

If you value a man’s regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper – and despise it.

Some people are stuck on who I was that who I am never even had a chance.

No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can’t dishearten it.

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

If you miss the present moment, you miss your appointment with life. That is very serious!

Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.