William Godwin's Quotes

My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

Study with desire is real activity; without desire it is but the semblance and mockery of activity.

The great model of the affection of love in human beings is the sentiment which subsists between parents and children.

The lessons of their early youth regulated the conduct of their riper years.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.

There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination.

There is reverence that we owe to everything in human shape.

There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers; we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness.

They held it their duty to live but for their country.

To him it is an ocean, unfathomable, and without a shore.

We cannot perform our tasks to the best of our power, unless we think well of our own capacity.

He has no right to his life when his duty calls him to resign it. Other men are bound... to deprive him of life or liberty, if that should appear in any case to be indispensably necessary to prevent a greater evil.

Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.

One of the prerogatives by which man is eminently distinguished from all other living beings inhabiting this globe of earth, consists in the gift of reason.

The real or supposed rights of man are of two kinds, active and passive; the right in certain cases to do as we list; and the right we possess to the forbearance or assistance of other men.

The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection.

If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me because his argument is weak.

Above all we should not forget that government is an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind.

The execution of any thing considerable implies in the first place previous persevering meditation.

He that loves reading has everything within his reach.

Justice is the sum of all moral duty.

Let us not, in the eagerness of our haste to educate, forget all the ends of education.

Perseverance is an active principle, and cannot continue to operate but under the influence of desire.

Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny.

Revolutions are the produce of passion, not of sober and tranquil reason.

The diligent scholar is he that loves himself, and desires to have reason to applaud and love himself.