Thomas More Quotes

1. “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.”

— Thomas More

2. “A drowning man will clutch at a straw.”

— Thomas More

3. “I die the king’s faithful servant, but God’s first.”

— Thomas More

4. “You wouldn’t abandon ship in a storm just because you couldn’t control the winds.”

— Thomas More

5. “Occupy your mind with good thoughts, or the enemy will fill them with bad ones.”

— Thomas More

6. “I should only ever tell the king what he ought to do, not what he could do. For if the lion knows his own strength, no man could control him.”

— Thomas More

7. “The things we pray for, good Lord, give us grace to labor for.”

— Thomas More

8. “The times are never so bad but that a good man can make shift to live in them.”

— Thomas More

9. “What though youth gave love and roses, Age still leaves us friends and wine.”

— Thomas More

10. “If honor were profitable, everybody would be honorable.”

— Thomas More

11. “If we lived in a state where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us saintly. But since we see that avarice, anger, pride and stupidity commonly profit far beyond charity, modesty, justice and thought, perhaps we must stand fast a little, even at the risk of being heroes.”

— Thomas More

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

— Thomas More

13. “The heart that has truly loved never forgets.”

— Thomas More

14. “One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.”

— Thomas More

15. “Lord, give me a sense of humor so that I may take some happiness from this life and share it with others.”

— Thomas More

16. “It’s wrong to deprive someone else of a pleasure so that you can enjoy one yourself, but to deprive yourself of a pleasure so that you can add to someone else’s enjoyment is an act of humanity by which you always gain more than you lose.”

— Thomas More

17. “I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.”

— Thomas More

18. “Pride thinks it’s own happiness shines the brighter by comparing it with the misfortunes of others.”

— Thomas More

19. “There is a great number of noblemen among you that are themselves as idle as drones, that subsist on other men’s labour, on the labour of their tenants, whom, to raise their revenues, they pare to the quick.”

— Thomas More

20. “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.”

— Thomas More

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21. “Nobody owns anything but everyone is rich – for what greater wealth can there be than cheerfulness, peace of mind, and freedom from anxiety?”

— Thomas More

22. “As for rosemary, I let it run all over my garden walls, not only because my bees love it but because it is the herb sacred to remembrance and to friendship, whence a sprig of it hath a dumb language.”

— Thomas More

23. “Most people know nothing about learning; many despise it. Dummies reject as too hard whatever is not dumb.”

— Thomas More

24. “I would uphold the law if for no other reason but to protect myself.”

— Thomas More

25. “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.”

— Thomas More

26. “No living creature is naturally greedy, except from fear of want – or in the case of human beings, from vanity, the notion that you’re better than people if you can display more superfluous property than they can.”

— Thomas More

27. “They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters.”

— Thomas More

28. “Anyone who campaigns for public office becomes disqualified for holding any office at all.”

— Thomas More

29. “Because the soul has such deep roots in personal and social life and its values run so contrary to modern concerns, caring for the soul may well turn out to be a radical act, a challenge to accepted norms.”

— Thomas More

30. “To gold and silver nature hath given no use that we may not well lack.”

— Thomas More

31. “What part soever you take upon you, play that as well as you can and make the best of it.”

— Thomas More

32. “No one, on his deathbed, ever regretted having been a Catholic.”

— Thomas More

33. “Whoever loveth me, loveth my hound.”

— Thomas More

34. “Two evils, greed and faction are the destruction of all justice.”

— Thomas More

35. “Friendship demands attention.”

— Thomas More

36. “We cannot go to heaven in featherbeds.”

— Thomas More

37. “I must say, extreme justice is an extreme injury: for we ought not to approve of those terrible laws that make the smallest offences capital, nor of that opinion of the Stoics that makes all crimes equal;.”

— Thomas More

38. “It is the fear of want that makes any of the whole race of animals either greedy or ravenous but besides fear there is in man a pride that makes him fancy it a particular glory to excel others in pomp and excess but by the laws of the utopians there is no room for this.”

— Thomas More

39. “See me safe up: for in my coming down, I can shift for myself.”

— Thomas More

40. “I’m responsible for my own work, and my own work alone, not for anyone else’s credibility.”

— Thomas More

41. “It is a wise mans part, rather to avoid sickness, than to wish for medicines.”

— Thomas More

42. “Natural, as they define it, is synonymous with virtuous.”

— Thomas More

43. “If the lion knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him.”

— Thomas More

44. “What is deferred is not avoided.”

— Thomas More

45. “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.”

— Thomas More

46. “The way to heaven out of all places is of length and distance.”

— Thomas More

47. “The ordinary arts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest.”

— Thomas More

48. “An absolutely new idea is one of the rarest things known to man.”

— Thomas More

49. “A man taking basil from a woman will love her always.”

— Thomas More

50. “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.”

— Thomas More