Top 73 William Godwin Quotes
#1. Whenever truth stands in the mind unaccompanied by the evidence upon which it depends, it cannot properly be said to be apprehended at all.
William Godwin
#2. What indeed is life, unless so far as it is enjoyed? It does not merit the name.
William Godwin
#3. A celebrated north country apostle, who, after Calvin had damned ninety-nine in a hundred of mankind, had contrived a scheme for damning ninety-nine in a hundred of the followers of Calvin.
William Godwin
#4. To him it is an ocean, unfathomable, and without a shore.
William Godwin
#5. Hereditary wealth is in reality a premium paid to idleness.
William Godwin
#6. My mind was bursting with depression and anguish. I muttered imprecations and murmuring as I passed along. I was full of loathing and abhorrence of life, and all that life carries in its train.
William Godwin
#7. If admiration were not generally deemed the exclusive property of the rich, and contempt the constant lackey of poverty, the love of gain would cease to be an universal problem.
William Godwin
#8. Books gratify and excite our curiosity in innumerable ways.
William Godwin
#9. Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.
William Godwin
#10. Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny.
William Godwin
#11. No maxim can be more pernicious than that which would teach us to consult the temper of the times, and to tell only so much as we imagine our contemporaries will be able to bear.
William Godwin
#12. Everything understood by the term co-operation is in some sense an evil.
William Godwin
#13. Government can have no more than two legitimate purposes - the suppression of injustice against individuals within the community, and the common defense against external invasion.
William Godwin
#14. What can be more clear and sound in explanation, than the love of a parent to his child?
William Godwin
#15. We cannot perform our tasks to the best of our power, unless we think well of our own capacity.
William Godwin
#16. But the watchful care of the parent is endless. The youth is never free from the danger of grating interference.
William Godwin
#17. He that revels in a well-chosen library has inumerable dishes, and all of admirable flavor.
William Godwin
#18. It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient.
William Godwin
#19. Power is not happiness. Security and peace are more to be desired than a man at which nations tremble.
William Godwin
#20. 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.
William Godwin
#21. If a thing be really good, it can be shown to be such.
William Godwin
#22. Study with desire is real activity; without desire it is but the semblance and mockery of activity.
William Godwin
#23. The lessons of their early youth regulated the conduct of their riper years.
William Godwin
#24. The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection.
William Godwin
#25. 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.
William Godwin
#26. The diligent scholar is he that loves himself, and desires to have reason to applaud and love himself.
William Godwin
#28. Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms.
William Godwin
#29. Above all we should not forget that government is an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind.
William Godwin
#30. 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.
William Godwin
#31. As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.
William Godwin
#32. Revolutions are the produce of passion, not of sober and tranquil reason.
William Godwin
#33. There is no sphere in which a human being can be supposed to act where one mode of reasoning will not, in every given instance, be more reasonable than any other mode. That mode the being is bound by every principle of justice to pursue.
William Godwin
#34. Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species.
William Godwin
#35. It is absurd to expect the inclinations and wishes of two human beings to coincide, through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and live together is to subject them to some inevitable potion of thwarting, bickering, and unhappiness.
William Godwin
#36. 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.
William Godwin
#37. If there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind.
William Godwin
#38. 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.
William Godwin
#40. If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book,
William Godwin
#41. The subtleties of mathematics defecate the grossness of our apprehension, and supply the elements of a sounder and severer logic.
William Godwin
#42. The virtue of a human being is the application of his capacity to the general good.
William Godwin
#43. All education is despotism. It is perhaps impossible for the young to be conducted without introducing in many cases the tyranny implicit in obedience. Go there; do that; read; write; rise; lie down - will perhaps forever be the language addressed to youth by age.
William Godwin
#44. The cause of justice is the cause of humanity. Its advocates should overflow with universal good will. We should love this cause, for it conduces to the general happiness of mankind.
William Godwin
#45. Our judgment will always suspect those weapons that can be used with equal prospect of success on both sides.
William Godwin
#46. Of Belief Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances.
William Godwin
#47. We are so curiously made that one atom put in the wrong place in our original structure will often make us unhappy for life.
William Godwin
#48. Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions.
William Godwin
#49. Perseverance is an active principle, and cannot continue to operate but under the influence of desire.
William Godwin
#51. Duty is that mode of action on the part of the individual which constitutes the best possible application of his capacity to the general benefit.
William Godwin
#52. There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination.
William Godwin
#53. There is reverence that we owe to everything in human shape.
William Godwin
#54. Let us not, in the eagerness of our haste to educate, forget all the ends of education.
William Godwin
#55. Self-respect to be nourished in the mind of the pupil, is one of the most valuable results of a well conducted education.
William Godwin
#56. The great model of the affection of love in human beings is the sentiment which subsists between parents and children.
William Godwin
#57. Every man has a certain sphere of discretion which he has a right to expect shall not be infringed by his neighbours. This right flows from the very nature of man.
William Godwin
#58. Books are the depositary of everything that is most honourable to man.
William Godwin
#59. To conceive that compulsion and punishment are the proper means of reformation is the sentiment of a barbarian.
William Godwin
#60. The first duty of man is to take none of the principles of conduct upon trust; to do nothing without a clear and individual conviction that it is right to be done.
William Godwin
#61. Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius ... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.
William Godwin
#62. It is probable that there is no one thing that it is of eminent importance for a child to learn.
William Godwin
#63. They held it their duty to live but for their country.
William Godwin
#64. Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.
William Godwin
#66. A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, embowelled and embalmed, but that once had flesh, and motion, and a boundless variety of determinations and actions.
William Godwin
#67. 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.
William Godwin
#68. In a well-written book we are presented with the maturest reflections, or the happiest flights of a mind of uncommon excellence. It is impossible that we can be much accustomed to such companions without attaining some resemblance to them.
William Godwin
#69. 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.
William Godwin
#70. He that loves reading has everything within his reach.
William Godwin
#71. The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.
William Godwin
#72. In cases where every thing is understood, and measured, and reduced to rule, love is out of the question.
William Godwin
#73. The execution of any thing considerable implies in the first place previous persevering meditation.
William Godwin
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