William Godwin quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

He that loves reading has everything within his reach.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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