William Godwin

Duty is that mode of action which constitutes the best application of the capacity of the individual to the general advantage.

The admission of one man, either hereditarily or for life only, into the place of chief of a country, is an evidence of the infirmity of man. Nature has set up no difference between a king and other men; a king, therefore, is purely the creation of our own hands.

We cannot, any of us, do all the things of which mankind stand in need; we must have fellow-labourers.

We cannot do justice to the deeds of former times if we do not in some degree remove ourselves from the circumstances in which we stand and substitute those by which the real actors were surrounded.

I know nothing worth the living for but usefulness and the service of my fellow-creatures. The only object I pursue is to increase, as far as lies in my power, the quantity of their knowledge and goodness and happiness.

Man is a being of a mixed nature; and, as there is no integrity without its flaws, so is there no man so knavish but that in some things he may be trusted.

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

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.

It is questionless desirable in all ordinary cases, wherever positive law is established, to restrain ourselves within the letter of that law and to allow the criminal all the benefit, if benefit to him shall result, of any evasion or escape that the law shall afford him.

The true object of moral and political disquisition is pleasure or happiness.

Harshness and unkindness are relative. The appearance of them may be the fruits of the greatest kindness.

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.

In cases where every thing is understood, and measured, and reduced to rule, love is out of the question.

The extent of our progress in the cultivation of knowledge is unlimited.

Human creatures, living in the circle of their intimates and friends, are too apt to remain in ignorance of the comments and instructions which may be made of what they say and do in the world at large. I entertain a great horror of this ignorance.

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.

Government, as it was forced upon mankind by their vices, so has it commonly been the creature of their ignorance and mistake.

There is nothing that human imagination can figure brilliant and enviable that human genius and skill do not aspire to realize.

Human depravity originates in the vices of political constitution.

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.

The man who plays his part upon the theatre of life almost always maintains what may be called an artificial character.

To diminish the cases in which the assistance of others is felt absolutely necessary is the only genuine road to independence.

Occupation - pressing occupation that will not be said nay - is a sovereign remedy for grief.

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.

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.

The question now afloat in the world respecting 'things as they are' is the most interesting that can be presented to the human mind. While one party pleads for reformation and change, the other extols in the warmest terms the existing constitution of society.

Since it is one of the great attributes of our species to be susceptible of improvement and capable of experiencing the most beneficial changes, for this reason what are vulgarly called 'venerable establishments' will often range themselves in opposition to the best interests of the community.

Soundness of understanding is connected with freedom of enquiry; consequently, opinion should, as far as public security will admit, be exempted from restraint.

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

I am most peremptorily of opinion against putting children extremely forward. If they desire it themselves, I would not balk them, for I love to attend to these unsophisticated indications. But otherwise, 'festina lente' is my maxim in education.

Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.

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.

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.

Give energy, and mental exertion will always have attraction enough.

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.

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

My temper is of a recluse and contemplative cast; had it been otherwise, I should, perhaps, on some former occasions, have entered into the active concerns of the world and not have been connected with it merely as a writer of books.

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.

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

The true key of the universe is love.

In the two novels I have published, it was my fortune at different times, and from different persons, to hear the most unqualified censure long before it was possible for me to hear the voice of the public. But my temper was not altered, nor my courage subdued.

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

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

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.

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

Men who do not contend in earnest can have little warmth and fervor in what they undertake, and are more than half prepared to betray the cause, in the vindication of which they have engaged their services.

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

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!

Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.

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

The most desirable state of mankind is that which maintains general security with the smallest encroachment upon individual independence.

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.

God himself has no right to be a tyrant.

The love of independence and dislike of unjust treatment is the source of a thousand virtues.

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.

Act up to the magnitude of your destiny.

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.

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.

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.

The evils that arise to us from the structure of the material universe are neither trivial nor few, yet the history of political society sufficiently shows that man is, of all other beings, the most formidable enemy to man.

Enthusiasm is always an interesting spectacle. When it expresses itself with an honest and artless eloquence, it is difficult to listen to it and not, in some degree, to catch the flame.

While my mother lived, I always felt to a certain degree as if I had somebody who was my superior and who exercised a mysterious protection over me. I belonged to something - I hung to something - there is nothing that has so much reverence and religion in it as affection to parents.

What can be more clear and sound in explanation, than the love of a parent to his child?

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.

During my academical life, and from this time forward, I was indefatigable in my search after truth. I read all the authors of greatest repute, for and against the Trinity, original sin, and the most disputed doctrines, but I was not yet of an understanding sufficiently ripe for impartial decision, and all my inquiries terminated in Calvinism.

Great changes cannot take place in the minds of generations of men without a corresponding change in their external symbols. There must be a harmony between the inner and the outward condition of human beings, and the progress of the one must keep pace with the progress of the other.

Perhaps the majority of human beings never think of standing by themselves, and choosing their own employments, till the sentence has been regularly promulgated to them, 'It is time for you to take care of yourself.'

What is there so offensive to which habit has not the power to reconcile us?

Was ever a great discovery prosecuted or an important benefit conferred upon the human race by him who was incapable of standing and thinking and feeling alone?

Love conquers all difficulties, surmounts all obstacles, and effects what to any other power would be impossible.

I was brought up in great tenderness, and though my mind was proud to independence, I was never led to much independence of feeling.

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.

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.

How are the faculties of man to be best developed and his happiness secured? The state of a king is not favorable to this, nor the state of the noble and rich men of the earth. All this is artificial life, the inventions of vanity and grasping ambition, by which we have spoiled the man of nature and of pure, simple, and undistorted impulses.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

Justice is the sum of all moral duty.

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.

In infamy, it is wisely provided that he who stands highest in the ranks of society has the heaviest load to sustain.

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.

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

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.

Extraordinary circumstances often bring along with them extraordinary strength. No man knows, till the experiment, what he is capable of effecting.

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.

I am now in the full maturity of my age and vigor of my mind. Persons of various descriptions have repeatedly solicited me to turn my mind to dramatical composition. It was, indeed, the first amusement of my thoughts in my school-boy cell.

No one can display or can cultivate a fervent zeal in the mere repetition of a form.

It is of no consequence whether a man of genius have learned either art or science before twenty-five: all that is necessary, or even desirable, is that his powers should be unfolded, his emulation roused, and his habits conducted into a right channel.

How nations and races of men are to be so governed as may be most conducive to the improvement and happiness of all is one of the most interesting questions that can be offered to our consideration.

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

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.

In the summer of 1791, I gave up my concern in the 'New Annual Register,' the historical part of which I had written for seven years, and abdicated, I hope forever, the task of performing a literary labour, the nature of which should be dictated by anything but the promptings of my own mind.

The value of a man is in his intrinsic qualities: in that of which power cannot strip him and which adverse fortune cannot take away. That for which he is indebted to circumstances is mere trapping and tinsel.

Everything understood by the term co-operation is in some sense an evil.

A world of derived beings, an immense, wide creation, requires an extended scale with various ranks and orders of existence.

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

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

With respect to my religious sentiments, I have the firmest assurance and tranquillity. I have faithfully endeavoured to improve the faculties and opportunities God has given me, and I am perfectly easy about the consequences.