Thomas More Quotes

The change of the word does not alter the matter

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.

A pretty face may be enough to catch a man, but it takes character and good nature to hold him.

For as love is oftentimes won with beauty, so it is not kept, preserved, and continued, but by virtue and obedience.

Some men may be snared by beauty alone, but none can be held except by virtue and compliance.

Kindness and good nature unite men more effectually and with greater strength than any agreements whatsoever, since thereby the engagements of men's hearts become stronger than the bond and obligation of words.

The most part of all princes have more delight in warlike manners and feats of chivalry than in the good feats of peace.

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.

It is naturally given to all men to esteem their own inventions best.

If it be a point of humanity for man to bring health and comfort to man, and especially to mitigate and assuage the grief of others, and by taking from them the sorrow and heaviness of life to restore them to joy, that is to say, to pleasure, why may it not then be said that nature does provoke every man to do the same to himself?

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.