William Penn Quotes
-
Covetousness is the greatest of monsters, as well as the root of all evil.
-
Neither despise nor oppose what thou dost not understand.
-
You are now fixed at the mercy of no governor that comes to make his fortune great; you shall be governed by laws of your own making and live a free, and if you will, a sober and industrious life. I shall not usurp the right of any, or oppress his person. God has furnished me with a better resolution and has given me his grace to keep it.
-
Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them, and as governments are made and moved by men, so by them they are ruined too. Wherefore governments rather depend upon men, than men upon governments. Let men be good, and the government cannot be bad; if it be ill, they will cure it. But if men be bad, let the government be never so good, they will endeavour to warp and spoil it to their turn.
-
Though our Savior's passion is over, his compassion is not.
-
In all debates, let truth be thy aim, not victory, or an unjust interest.
-
I shall pass through life but once. Let me show kindness now, as I shall not pass this way again.
-
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 mad.
-
They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies.
-
The Remedy often proves worse than the Disease.
-
Force may make hypocrites, but it can never make converts.
-
Death then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live if we cannot bear to die.
-
Experience is a safe guide.
-
To be innocent is to be not guilty; but to be virtuous is to overcome our evil inclinations.
-
Let the people think they govern and they will be governed.
-
If thou wouldst rule well, thou must rule for God, and to do that, thou must be ruled by him. Those who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.
-
Dislike what deserves it, but never hate: for that is of the nature of malice; which is almost ever to persons, not things, and is one of the blackest qualities sin begets in the soul. Dislike what deserves it, but never hate: for that is of the nature of malice; which is almost ever to persons, not things, and is one of the blackest qualities sin begets in the soul.
-
For as men in battle are continually in the way of shot, so we, in this world, are ever within the reach of Temptation.
-
Death cannot kill what never dies.
-
Sense shines with double lustre when set in humility.
-
It is admirable to consider how many millions of people come into, and go out of the world, ignorant of themselves and of the world they have lived in.
-
Inquiry is human; blind obedience brutal. Truth never loses by the one but often suffers by the other.
-
Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.
-
True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.