Sense shines with a double luster when it is set in humility. An able yet humble man is a jewel worth a kingdom.
William PennRead
The humble, meek, merciful, and just are everywhere of one religion; and when death has taken off the mask they will know one another, though the diverse liveries they wear here make them strangers.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True unity among people transcends superficial differences and reveals a shared essence after life.
This quote suggests that the fundamental qualities of humility, mercy, and justice create a connection among individuals that transcends the various identities and appearances they adopt in life. When death removes these superficial differences, the inherent similarities among those who embody these virtues become evident, revealing a universal bond that underlines the human experience.
Themes
UnityHumanityDifferencesVirtueMortality
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about diversity and acceptance during a community meeting.
More from William Penn
All quotes βWhere thou art Obliged to speak, be sure speak the Truth: For Equivocation is half way to Lying, as Lying, the whole way to Hell.
William PennRead
Man, being made reasonable, and so a thinking creature, there is nothing more worthy of his being than the right direction and employment of his thoughts; since upon this depends both his usefulness to the public, and his own present and future benefit in all respects.
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Do good with what thou hast, or it will do thee no good.
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To be a man's own fool is bad enough, but the vain man is everybody's.
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Unless virtue guide us our choice must be wrong.
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Similar quotes
Marijuana is rejected all over the world. Damned. In England heroin is alright for out-patents, but marijuana? They'll put your ass in jail. I wonder why that is? The only reason could be: To Serve the Devil - Pleasure! Pleasure, which is a dirty word in Christian culture.
Lenny BruceRead
There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto-God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.
Dorothy AllisonRead
I say the same of humility and of all the virtues; the wiles of the devil are terrible, he will run a thousand times round hell if by so doing he can make us believe that we have a single virtue which we have not. And he is right, for such ideas are very harmful, and such imaginary virtues, when they come from this source, are never unaccompanied by vainglory; just as those which God gives are free both from this and from pride.
Teresa Of AvilaRead
Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
Blaise PascalRead
Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young.
Jean-Jacques RousseauRead
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.
Edmund BurkeRead