William Penn

Liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery.

I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore there be any kindness I can show…let me do it now.- William Penn

Covetousness is the greatest of monsters, as well as the root of all evil.

It were endless to dispute upon everything that is disputable.

To be furious in religion is to be irreligiously religious.

The truest end of life is to know that life never ends.

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.

How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.

It is the amends of a short and troublesome life, that doing good and suffering ill entitles man to a longer and better

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved.

If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.

One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. When you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.

Ice-cream is exquisite – what a pity it isn’t illegal.

If men be good, government cannot be bad.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

Read your own compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

These times of ours are serious and full of calamity, but all times are essentially alike. As soon as there is life there is danger.

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.