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" 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. "

William Godwin

Connected

Books

Active

Related Quotes:

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

" There are so many ways in which the heart of man conceals itself from man! "

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

William Godwin

Mankind

Stand

" Justice is the sum of all moral duty. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

William Godwin

Desires

Reason

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Everything in the world is conducted by gradual process. This seems to be the great principle of harmony in the universe. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Act up to the magnitude of your destiny. "

William Godwin

Magnitude

Destiny

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Till 1782, I believed in the doctrine of Calvin: that is, that the majority of mankind were objects of divine condemnation and that their punishment would be everlasting. The 'Systeme de la Nature,' read about the beginning of that year, changed my opinion and made me a Deist. "

William Godwin

Beginning

Nature

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

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

William Godwin

Parent

Love

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

William Godwin

Educate

Haste

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It is the misfortune of those who are concerned in conducting human affairs that, however pure and capacious their own conceptions may be, they must accommodate themselves to the circumstances with which they are environed and use the instruments that are within their reach. "