William Penn

To be like Christ is to be a Christian.

Fidelity has enfranchised slaves, and adopted servants to be sons.

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

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.

Death then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live if we cannot bear to die.

Every stroke our fury strikes is sure to hit ourselves at last.

Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself.

Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: – I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.

We hate the kindness which we understand.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.

See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.

I thus free myself from the illness of ego-clinging.

The surest poison is time.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm.

What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind.

Men are respectable only as they respect.