QUOTES by William Godwin
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The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.
Quote by -William Godwin
The execution of any thing considerable implies in the first place previous persevering meditation.
Quote by -William Godwin
Study with desire is real activity; without desire it is but the semblance and mockery of activity.
Quote by -William Godwin
Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions.
Quote by -William Godwin
Let us not, in the eagerness of our haste to educate, forget all the ends of education.
Quote by -William Godwin
Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.
Quote by -William Godwin
What indeed is life, unless so far as it is enjoyed? It does not merit the name.
Quote by -William Godwin
The lessons of their early youth regulated the conduct of their riper years.
Quote by -William Godwin
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.
Quote by -William Godwin
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.
Quote by -William Godwin
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.
Quote by -William Godwin
Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny.
Quote by -William Godwin
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.
Quote by -William Godwin
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.
Quote by -William Godwin
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.
Quote by -William Godwin
A world of derived beings, an immense, wide creation, requires an extended scale with various ranks and orders of existence.
Quote by -William Godwin
I am an enemy to revolutions. I abhor, both from temper and from the clearest judgment I am able to form, all violent convulsions in the affairs of men.
Quote by -William Godwin
The love of independence and dislike of unjust treatment is the source of a thousand virtues.
Quote by -William Godwin
England has been called, with great felicity of conception, 'the land of liberty and good sense.' We have preserved many of the advantages of a free people, which the nations of the Continent have long since lost.
Quote by -William Godwin
I was brought up in great tenderness, and though my mind was proud to independence, I was never led to much independence of feeling.
Quote by -William Godwin
I was famous in our college for calm and impassionate discussion; for one whole summer, I rose at five and went to bed at midnight, that I might have sufficient time for theology and metaphysics.
Quote by -William Godwin
The four principal oral instructors to whom I feel my mind indebted for improvement were Joseph Fawcet, Thomas Holcroft, George Dyson, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Quote by -William Godwin
We have, all of us, our duties. Every action of our lives, and every word that we utter, will either conduce to or detract from the discharge of our duty.
Quote by -William Godwin
We cannot, any of us, do all the things of which mankind stand in need; we must have fellow-labourers.
Quote by -William Godwin
The true object of moral and political disquisition is pleasure or happiness.
Quote by -William Godwin
Government, as it was forced upon mankind by their vices, so has it commonly been the creature of their ignorance and mistake.
Quote by -William Godwin
Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.
Quote by -William Godwin
Duty is that mode of action which constitutes the best application of the capacity of the individual to the general advantage.
Quote by -William Godwin
Soundness of understanding is connected with freedom of enquiry; consequently, opinion should, as far as public security will admit, be exempted from restraint.
Quote by -William Godwin
When we look on the roses and gaiety of youth, the mournful idea of mortality is altogether alien to our thoughts. We have heard of it as a speculation and a tale, but nothing but experience can bring it home to us.
Quote by -William Godwin
The world is all alike. Those that seem better than their neighbours are only more artful. They mean the same thing, though they take a different road.
Quote by -William Godwin
We covet experience; we have a secret desire to learn, not from cold prohibition, but from trial, whether those things, which are not without a semblance of good, are really so ill as they are described to us.
Quote by -William Godwin
I know not how it is: there are some businesses for which dullness seems to be a qualification.
Quote by -William Godwin
Invisible things are the only realities; invisible things alone are the things that shall remain.
Quote by -William Godwin
What is high birth to him to whom high birth has never been the theme of his contemplation? What is a throne to him who has never dreamed of a throne?
Quote by -William Godwin
It is one of the oldest maxims of moral prudence: Do not, by aspiring to what is impracticable, lose the opportunity of doing the good you can effect!
Quote by -William Godwin
Occupation - pressing occupation that will not be said nay - is a sovereign remedy for grief.
Quote by -William Godwin
The Italian character in general is full of animation, and the natives enter into the interests and welfare of the stranger before them with a fervor that forbids all doubt of its sincerity and that is truly surprising.
Quote by -William Godwin
The man who plays his part upon the theatre of life almost always maintains what may be called an artificial character.
Quote by -William Godwin
Every boy learns more in his hours of play than in his hours of labor. In school, he lays in the materials of thinking, but in his sports, he actually thinks: he whets his faculties, and he opens his eyes.
Quote by -William Godwin
Let no man despise the oracles of books! 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.
Quote by -William Godwin