Genuine, and traceable to the page. Both sentences appear in More Fruits of Solitude, the second part of Penn’s Reflections and Maxims, under the heading “Union of Friends” — but Penn printed them as two separately numbered maxims, 127 and 128, not as the single sentence that circulates today. Confirmed in the 1718 London edition scanned by the Internet Archive ↗.
“They that love beyond the World, cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill, what never dies” William Penn, More Fruits of Solitude (London: Printed and Sold by the Assigns of J. Sowle, 1718), "Union of Friends," maxims 127–128. Verified via quotle.info
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Provenance
The maxims, as Penn printed them
Work
More Fruits of Solitude: Being the Second Part of Reflections and Maxims, Relating to the Conduct of Human Life
Section
“Union of Friends,” maxims 127 and 128
Edition
London: Printed and Sold by the Assigns of J. Sowle, at the Bible in George-Yard, Lombard-Street, 1718
Author
William Penn (1644–1718), published anonymously in his lifetime
127. They that love beyond the World, cannot be separated by it. 128. Death cannot kill, what never dies. 129. Nor can Spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their Friendship. 130. If Absence be not Death, neither is theirs. 131. Death is but Crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas; They live in one another still.
Union of Friends · 1718
Transcribed from the “Union of Friends” section. Penn numbered each sentence separately; the quotation everyone knows is 127 and 128 run together. The section continues to 134.
Searched the scanned 1718 London edition of More Fruits of Solitude ↗ and found both sentences under the running head “Union of Friends,” numbered 127 and 128, with the imprint “Printed and Sold by the Assigns of J. Sowle, at the Bible in George-Yard, Lombard-Street.”
Cross-checked the clean text of the 1903 H. M. Caldwell reprint ↗, whose introduction by Edmund Gosse states that the first part was licensed on 24 May 1693, that More Fruits made its earliest appearance in 1718, and that this reprint follows the 1718 text rather than the 1693 one.
Confirmed the maxim numbers against Wikiquote’s sourced William Penn page ↗, which carries the passage cited to numbers 127–134 of Part II. Quote Investigator has no entry on this line — there is no attribution dispute to settle, only a wording one.
✓Public domain
More Fruits of Solitude was printed in London in 1718 and has been reprinted continuously since; the text is long out of copyright in the United States, as any work first published before 1931 is. The wording quoted here is Penn’s own English, not a translation, so no separate translator’s copyright attaches. The Internet Archive’s 1903 reprint is likewise flagged NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Right author, reshaped quote
Nobody is stealing this one from William Penn — he wrote every word. What has drifted is the shape of it: which book it comes from, how many sentences it is, and what kind of writing it was in the first place.
✕
The wordingOne sentence Merged
Penn numbered them separately: “127. They that love beyond the World, cannot be separated by it.” and “128. Death cannot kill, what never dies.” The familiar single-sentence quotation runs two distinct maxims together, as the 1718 first edition ↗ shows.
✕
The bookSome Fruits of Solitude (1693) Wrong volume
Funeral-reading sites give the passage a title and break it into lines, as on this collection of funeral poems ↗. Penn wrote numbered prose aphorisms; the stanzas are a modern layout.
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Harry PotterThe Deathly Hallows epigraph Adjacent, not identical
Rowling’s epigraph draws on the same “Union of Friends” heading but on later maxims — 131 to 134, beginning “Death is but crossing the world” — as HogwartsProfessor documents ↗. These two lines are not the epigraph.
✓Penn wrote both sentences, in this order, as maxims 127 and 128 of the “Union of Friends” section of More Fruits of Solitude, printed in London in 1718 — readable in the first edition ↗.
Context
A book written in enforced retirement
Penn is remembered for a colony, not a commonplace book — but the Fruits of Solitude maxims are the part of him that still gets read aloud. Edmund Gosse, introducing the 1903 reprint, placed their writing in the stretch after the fall of James II when Penn, suspected of corresponding with the exiled king, had a warrant out against him and spent months in hiding; he was not fully reinstated until he appeared before William III in Council in the autumn of 1693. The book’s own author, Gosse noted, blesses God for his retirement and says he never had so much leisure in his life before.
The “Union of Friends” heading gathers eight short maxims on the same idea: that friendship survives distance, and that distance is all death is. More Fruits of Solitude was printed in London in 1718, the year Penn died. Read in that order, the famous line is the opening move of an argument rather than an epitaph — though an epitaph is almost entirely what it has become.
Death is but Crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas; They live in one another still.
The section that became a Harry Potter epigraph
J. K. Rowling opened Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with a passage from this same “Union of Friends” section — but not with these lines. The epigraph runs from “Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas” to “because immortal,” which is maxims 131 to 134, as HogwartsProfessor sets out line by line ↗. It is half of the eight aphorisms Penn filed under that heading.
The other half — maxims 127 and 128 — had a separate afterlife in funeral orders of service, where they are routinely set as verse under a title, as on this British funeral-readings site ↗. Penn wrote prose.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1644–1718 · English Quaker writer and founder of Pennsylvania
William Penn was an English Quaker who was jailed repeatedly for his beliefs — including a stretch in the Tower of London in 1668–69 — and who went on to found the colony of Pennsylvania. He is remembered chiefly as a colonist and advocate of religious toleration, but his most durable piece of writing is a small, unshowy book of aphorisms: Some Fruits of Solitude (licensed 1693) and its sequel More Fruits of Solitude (1718). Edmund Gosse, introducing a 1903 reprint, argued the maxims came out of the years when Penn was out of favour and in hiding after the fall of James II — the enforced leisure Penn thanks God for in the book itself.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Penn, William. More Fruits of Solitude: Being the Second Part of Reflections and Maxims, Relating to the Conduct of Human Life. London: Printed and Sold by the Assigns of J. Sowle, 1718. “Union of Friends,” maxims 127–128.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘They that love beyond the World, cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill, what never dies’?” Last verified 25 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/they-that-love-beyond-the-world-cannot-be-separated-by-it/