Thomas More Quotes
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Instead of inflicting these horrible punishments, it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody's under the frightful necessity of becoming, first a thief, and then a corpse.
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For men use, if they have an evil turn, to write it in marble; and whoso doth us a good turn we write it in dust.
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Rose! Thou art the sweetest flower that ever drank the amber shower: Even the Gods, who walk the sky, are amourous of thy scented sigh.
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A good tale evil told were better untold, and an evil take well told need none other solicitor.
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Everywhere do I percieve a certain conspiracy of rich men seeking their own advantage underthat name and pretext of commonwealth.
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Your love has build me from strength to strength. It has made me a stronger and better person than I was. There is nothing that love cannot change darling. Once you fall in love, even wars turn to love stories.
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Anyone who campaigns for public office becomes disqualified for holding any office at all.
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Howbeit, this one thing, son, I assure you on my faith, that if the parties will at hands call for justice, then, all were it my father stood on the one side, and the devil on the other, his cause being good, the devil should have right.
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If honor were profitable, everybody would be honorable.
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Every tribulation which ever comes our way either is sent to be medicinal, if we will take it as such, or may become medicinal, if we will make it such, or is better than medicinal, unless we forsake it.
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Pride measures prosperity not by her own advantages but by the disadvantages of others. She would not even wish to be a goddess unless there were some wretches left whom she could order about and lord it over, whose misery would make her happiness seem all the more extraordinary, whose poverty can be tormented and exacerbated by a display of her wealth. This infernal serpent, pervading the human heart, keeps men from reforming their lives, holding them back like a suckfish.
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Every man has by the law of nature a right to such a waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence.
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There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves, but it were much better to make such good provisions by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and of dying for it.
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The education of youth belongs to the priests, yet they do not take so much care of instructing them in letters, as in forming their minds and manners aright; they use all possible methods to infuse, very early, into the tender and flexible minds of children, such opinions as are both good in themselves and will be useful to their country, for when deep impressions of these things are made at that age, they follow men through the whole course of their lives, and conduce much to preserve the peace of the government, which suffers by nothing more than by vices that rise out of ill opinions.
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For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.
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A pretty face may be enough to catch a man, but it takes character and good nature to hold him.
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In the first place, most princes apply themselves to the arts of war, in which I have neither ability nor interest, instead of to the good arts of peace. They are generally more set on acquiring new kingdoms by hook or by crook than on governing well those that they already have.
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Lawyers-a profession it is to disguise matters.
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There are several sorts of religions, not only in different parts of the island, but even in every town; some worshipping the sun, others the moon or one of the planets.
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. . . the state of things and the dispositions of men were then such, that a man could not well tell whom he might trust or whom he might fear.
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A man taking basil from a woman will love her always.
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Getting married is like putting one's hand in a bag containing 99 serpents and one eel.
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For when they see the people swarm into the streets, and daily wet to the skin with rain, and yet cannot persuade them to go out of the rain, they do keep themselves within their houses, seeing they cannot remedy the folly of the people.
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Oh! blame not the bard.