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" There is scarcely an instant that passes over our heads that may not have its freight of infamy. How ought we to watch over our thoughts, that we may not so much as imagine any enormity! "

William Godwin

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

" It is indeed specially characteristic of the passion of love that it has the faculty of giving a perpetual flow to the interchange of sentiments and reflections in conversation. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" No man knows the value of innocence and integrity but he who has lost them. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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

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

" 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. "

" 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? "

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

William Godwin

Strength

Man

" 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. "

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

William Godwin

Educate

Haste

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

" 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. "

" How different a creature is man in society and man in solitude! "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him. "

" 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. "

" 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. "