Love Quote by William Penn

Penn lands a moral slap with the calm authority of someone who built a society on principle and then watched people try to game it. The line admits an uncomfortable truth about human nature: we crave the public reward of goodness more than the private discipline that actually produces it. Praise is easy to want because it costs nothing and signals status; virtue is harder because it binds you when nobody is watching.

The sentence is engineered like a Quaker meeting: spare, quiet, and relentless. “Apt” softens the accusation just enough to keep the listener from defensiveness, then “but not deserve it” tightens the screw. He’s not condemning ambition; he’s diagnosing a mismatch between appetite and character. The remedy isn’t “try harder” but a reordering of loves. Penn’s key move is to frame ethics as desire management: if your deepest affection is for applause, you’ll manufacture virtue as performance. If you love virtue more than praise, praise becomes incidental - sometimes welcome, never controlling.

Context matters. Penn was a political and religious dissenter, shaping Pennsylvania as an experiment in toleration under constant scrutiny from crown, critics, and competing interests. In that world, reputation was currency, and “goodness” could be deployed as propaganda. The subtext is a warning to leaders and communities alike: don’t confuse the glow of approval with the substance of integrity. A society can’t be held together by compliments; it holds when people choose the harder loyalty to what is right over what is admired.