William Godwin
Love conquers all difficulties, surmounts all obstacles, and effects what to any other power would be impossible.Collection: Power
The most desirable state of mankind is that which maintains general security with the smallest encroachment upon individual independence.Collection: Independence
It is necessary for him who would endure existence with patience that he should conceive himself to be something - that he should be persuaded he is not a cipher in the muster-roll of man.Collection: Patience
In the graver and more sentimental communication of man and man, the head still bears the superior sway; in the unreserved intimacies of man and woman, the heart is ever uppermost. Feeling is the main thing, and judgment passes for little.Collection: Communication
The extent of our progress in the cultivation of knowledge is unlimited.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Brainy
Let us not, in the eagerness of our haste to educate, forget all the ends of education.Collection: Education
To diminish the cases in which the assistance of others is felt absolutely necessary is the only genuine road to independence.Collection: Independence
Justice is the sum of all moral duty.Collection: Legal
What are gold and jewels and precious utensils? Mere dross and dirt. The human face and the human heart, reciprocations of kindness and love, and all the nameless sympathies of our nature - these are the only objects worth being attached to.Collection: Sympathy
The true key of the universe is love.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Education
I believe in this being, not because I have any proper or direct knowledge of His existence, but I am at a loss to account for the existence and arrangement of the visible universe, and, being left in the wide sea of conjecture without a clue from analogy or experience, I find the conjecture of a God easy, obvious, and irresistible.Collection: Knowledge
When the calamity we feared is already arrived, or when the expectation of it is so certain as to shut out hope, there seems to be a principle within us by which we look with misanthropic composure on the state to which we are reduced, and the heart sullenly contracts and accommodates itself to what it most abhorred.Collection: Hope
Religion is among the most beautiful and most natural of all things - that religion which 'sees God in clouds and hears Him in the wind,' which endows every object of sense with a living soul, which finds in the system of nature whatever is holy, mysterious and venerable, and inspires the bosom with sentiments of awe and veneration.Collection: Religion
He that loves reading has everything within his reach.Collection: Education
Sympathy is one of the principles most widely rooted in our nature: we rejoice to see ourselves reflected in another; and, perversely enough, we sometimes have a secret pleasure in seeing the sin which dwells in ourselves existing under a deformed and monstrous aspect in another.Collection: Sympathy
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.Collection: Imagination
There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination.Collection: Imagination
Invisible things are the only realities; invisible things alone are the things that shall remain.Collection: Alone
The love of independence and dislike of unjust treatment is the source of a thousand virtues.Collection: Independence
I was brought up in great tenderness, and though my mind was proud to independence, I was never led to much independence of feeling.Collection: Independence
No man knows the value of innocence and integrity but he who has lost them.
Law is made for man and not man for the law. Wherever we can be sure that the most valuable interests of a nation require that we should decide one way, that way we ought to decide.
The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection.
Innocence is not virtue. Virtue demands the active employment of an ardent mind in the promotion of the general good. No man can be eminently virtuous who is not accustomed to an extensive range of reflection.
Hope is in some respects a thing more brilliant, more vivifying, than fruition. What we have looked forward to with eager and earnest aspiration is never in all respects equal to the picture we had formed of it. The very uncertainty enhances the enjoyment.
Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny.
Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.
Above all we should not forget that government is an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind.
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.
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.
The true object of moral and political disquisition is pleasure or happiness.
God himself has no right to be a tyrant.
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.
Harshness and unkindness are relative. The appearance of them may be the fruits of the greatest kindness.
Self-deception is so far from impossible that it is one of the most ordinary phenomena with which we are acquainted. Nothing is more usual than for a man to impute his actions to honorable motives when it is nearly demonstrable that they flowed from some corrupt and contemptible force.
God is a being who is himself the cause of his own existence. His prerogative is to perceive before there was anything to be perceived. He is the creator of the universe; He operated upon nothing and turned it into something.
Woe to the man who is always busy - hurried in a turmoil of engagements, from occupation to occupation, and with no seasons interposed of recollection, contemplation and repose! Such a man must inevitably be gross and vulgar, and hard and indelicate - the sort of man with whom no generous spirit would desire to hold intercourse.
Study with desire is real activity; without desire it is but the semblance and mockery of activity.
Perseverance is an active principle, and cannot continue to operate but under the influence of desire.
The soul of man is one of those subtle and evanescent substances that, as long as they remain still, the organ of sight does not remark; it must become agitated to become visible.
A just and a brave man acts fearlessly and with explicitness; he does not shun, but court, the scrutiny of mankind; he lives in the face of day, and the whole world confesses the clearness of his spirit and the rectitude of his conduct.
We cannot perform our tasks to the best of our power, unless we think well of our own capacity.
In contemplation and reverie, one thought introduces another perpetually; and it is by similarity, or the hooking of one upon the other, that the process of thinking is carried on.
Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.
There is a class of persons whose souls are essentially non-conductors to the electricity of sentiment, and whose minds seem to be filled with their own train of thinking, convictions, and purposes to the exclusion of everything else.
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.
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.