§
“a
man for all seasons”
--Whittington and Erasmus about Thomas More, 1520
and 1521
§ “I die
the king’s good
servant, and God’s first.”
--On the scaffold, July 6, 1535 (from the Paris
Newsletter account)
On Truth
§ “time trieth truth.”
--Thomas More’s Supplication
of Souls, CWM *,
v. 7, p. 135
On Public Service:
§ “You must not abandon the ship in a storm because you cannot
control the winds….What you cannot turn to good, you must at least make as
little bad as you can.”
--Utopia,
CWM, v. 4, pp. 99, 101
§ “[If a leader allows weariness to so grip] the mind that
its strength is sapped and reason gives up the reins, if a [leader] is so
overcome by heavy-hearted sleep that he neglects to do what the duty of his
office requires…--like the cowardly ship’s captain who is so disheartened
by the furious din of the storm that he deserts the helm, hides away cowering
in some cranny, and abandons the ship to the waves—if a [leader] does this,
I would certainly not hesitate to juxtapose and compare his sadness with the
sadness that leads as [Paul] says, to hell….”
--On
the Sadness of Christ, CWM, v. 14, pp. 263, 265
On Law:
§ “Were it my father on the one side and the devil on the
other, his cause being good, the devil should have his right.”
--Life of Thomas
More by William Roper
On Conscience:
§ “The clearness of my conscience has made my heart hop for
joy.”
--“Letter to Margaret Roper,” from the Tower,
1534, Selected Letters #60, p. 235.
§ “My case was such in this matter through the clearness of
my own conscience that thought I might have pain I could not have harm,
for a man may in such a case lose his head and not have harm.”
-- “Letter
to Margaret Roper,” from the Tower, June 3, 1535
§ “Thus being so well and quietly settled in conscience, the
security and uprightness of the same so eased and diminished all the griefs
and pains of his imprisonment and all his other adversity, that no token
or signification of lamenting or sorrow appeared in him, but that in his communication
with his daughter, with the Lieutenant and others, he held on his old merry,
pleasant talk whosoever occasion served.”
--Life of Thomas
More by William Roper
§ “I never intend, God being my good Lord, to pin my soul
to another man’s back, not even the best man that I know this day living:
for I know not where he may hap to carry it.”
-- Dialogue
on Conscience, to his daughter, in prison, August 1534
On Education:
§ “The whole fruit of their [educational] endeavors should
consist in the testimony of God and a good conscience. Thus they will
be inwardly calm and at peace and neither stirred by praise of flatterers
nor stung by the follies of unlearned mockers of learning.”
--“Letter
to William Gonell,” his children’s tutor, May 22, 1518
§ “Reason is by study, labor, and exercise of logic, philosophy,
and other liberal arts corroborate [i.e., strengthened] and quickened; and
the judgment both in them and also in orators, laws, and stories [is] much
ripened. And although poets are with many men taken but for painted
words, yet do they much help the judgment, and make a man among other things
well furnished in one special thing, without which all learning is half lame…a
good mother wit.”
-- A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, CWM, v.6,
p. 132
On Self-Government:
§ I would have people in time of silence take good heed that
their minds be occupied with good thoughts, for unoccupied they will never
be.
--The
Four Last Things, CWM, v.1, p. 138
§ I think that if any good thing shall go forward, something
must be adventured.
--A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, CWM, v. 6,
p. 339
§ In the things of the soul, knowledge without remembrance
profits little.
--The
Four Last Things, CWM, v.1,
p. 138
On Suffering:
§ We cannot go to heaven in featherbeds.
--Life of Thomas
More by William Roper; More to his
children, c. 1510
§ 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.
--Dialogue of
Comfort Against Tribulation, CWM, v. 12, p. 23
On Pride:
§ “But no matter how high in the clouds this arrow of pride
may fly, and no matter how exuberant one may feel while being carried up
so high, let us remember that the lightest of these arrows still has a heavy
iron head. High as it may fly, therefore, it inevitably has to come down
and hit the ground. And sometimes it lands in a not very clean place.”
-- Dialogue of
Comfort Against Tribulation, CWM, v.12, pp. 157-8
§ “I will simply counsel every man and woman to beware of
even the very least speck of [pride], which seems to me to be the mere delight
and liking of ourselves for anything whatsoever that either is in us or outwardly
belongs to us.”
-- The Treatise Upon the Passion, CWM, v.13,
p. 9
§ Aesop says in a fable that everyone carries a double wallet
on his shoulders, and into the one that hangs at his breast he puts other
folk’s faults and he looks and pores over it often. In the other he
puts all his own and swings it at his back, which he never likes to look
in, although others that come behind him cast an eye into it sometimes.
-- A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, CWM, v.6,
pp. 295-6
§ As Boethius says: For one man to be proud that he has rule
over other men is much like one mouse being proud to have rule over other
mice in a barn.
--"Dialogue
on Conscience," pp. 519-20
§ On glory: He who sets his delight on the blast of
another man’s mouth feeds himself but with wind, wherein, be he never so
full, he has little substance therein.
-- Dialogue of
Comfort Against Tribulation, CWM, v.12, p. 212
§ I never saw fool yet who thought himself other than wise…If
a fool perceives himself a fool, that point is not folly, but a little spark
of wit.
-- Dialogue of
Comfort Against Tribulation, CWM, v.12, p. 287
*N.B. CWM refers to The Complete
Works of St. Thomas More (1963-1997), published by Yale University Press.
Most of these quotations have been modernized in syntax and diction, and
therefore often differ from the original given in CWM.
