William Godwin Quotes

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

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

Self-respect to be nourished in the mind of the pupil, is one of the most valuable results of a well conducted education.

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.

Invisible things are the only realities; invisible things alone are the things that shall remain.

The virtue of a human being is the application of his capacity to the general good.

Power is not happiness.

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.

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

But the watchful care of the parent is endless. The youth is never free from the danger of grating interference.

Justice is the sum of all moral duty.

No man must encroach upon my province, nor I upon his. He may advise me, moderately and without pertinaciousness, but he must not expect to dictate to me. He may censure me freely and without reserve; but he should remember that I am to act by my deliberation and not his. I ought to exercise my talents for the benefit of others; but that exercise must be the fruit of my own conviction; no man must attempt to press me into the service.

Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny.... An attempt to scrutinize men's thoughts and punish their opinions is of all kinds of despotism the most odious: yet this is peculiarly character of a period of revolution.... There is no period more at war with the existence of liberty.

God himself has no right to be a tyrant.

What indeed is life, unless so far as it is enjoyed? It does not merit the name.

We are so curiously made that one atom put in the wrong place in our original structure will often make us unhappy for life.

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.

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.

Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands and perpetuate its institutions.

As long as parents and teachers in general shall fall under the established rule, it is clear that politics and modes of government will educate and infect us all. They poison our minds, before we can resist, or so much as suspect their malignity. Like the barbarous directors of the Eastern seraglios, they deprive us of our vitality, and fit us for their despicable employment from the cradle.

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.

Hereditary wealth is in reality a premium paid to idleness.

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

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.