Author Index: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

William Godwin


English
March 3, 1756
Writer
dolomites fanes landscape mountains
The true key of the universe is love.


William Godwin
dirt road forest woods trees path
To him it is an ocean, unfathomable, and without a shore.


William Godwin
Tags: Without Him Ocean
bridge wooden creek trees scenic
The lessons of their early youth regulated the conduct of their riper years.


William Godwin
Tags: Years Early Youth
denmark north sea clouds beach sea
What is there so offensive to which habit has not the power to reconcile us?


William Godwin
Tags: Power Which Us
Perseverance is an active principle, and cannot continue to operate but under the influence of desire.
William Godwin
zinnensee dolomites alm nature
Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.


William Godwin
In cases where every thing is understood, and measured, and reduced to rule, love is out of the question.
William Godwin
Tags: Out Love Thing
The great model of the affection of love in human beings is the sentiment which subsists between parents and children.
William Godwin
Tags: Great Love Which
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.
William Godwin
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.
William Godwin
Tags: Future Up Been
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?
William Godwin
Tags: Who Been Never
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.
William Godwin
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.
William Godwin
Tags: Men Power You
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
Tags: Our How Much
Without imagination, there can be no genuine ardor in any pursuit or for any acquisition, and without imagination, there can be no genuine morality, no profound feeling of other men's sorrow, no ardent and persevering anxiety for their interests.
William Godwin
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.
William Godwin
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.
William Godwin
Tags: Nature Our Love
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.
William Godwin
Tags: Men Life He
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.
William Godwin
Tags: Who Which Those
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
Tags: Nature Me About
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.
William Godwin
Tags: Time Truth Life
Social man regards all those by whom he is surrounded as enemies, or beings who may become such. He is ever on his guard lest his plain speaking should be willfully perverted, or should assume a meaning he never thought of, through the animosity or prejudice of the individual that hears him.
William Godwin
Tags: Who Never He
Religion is the most important of all things: the great point of discrimination that divides the man from the brute. It is our special prerogative that we can converse with that which we cannot see and believe in that the existence of which is reported to us by none of our senses.
William Godwin
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.
William Godwin
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.
William Godwin
Tags: Best Men Nature