Quotes from William Godwin

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.

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

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.

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

Tenderness is the name for a lover's most exquisite sensation; protection is implied in his most generous and heart-thrilling impulse.

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.

Our judgment will always suspect those weapons that can be used with equal prospect of success on both sides.

We are so curiously made that one atom put in the wrong place in our original structure will often make us unhappy for life.

What indeed is life, unless so far as it is enjoyed? It does not merit the name.

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!

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.

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.

I never did, and I never will, thank any man for altering any one word of my compositions without my privity.

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

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

My mind was bursting with depression and anguish. I muttered imprecations and murmuring as I passed along. I was full of loathing and abhorrence of life, and all that life carries in its train.

Of Belief Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances.

I know not how it is: there are some businesses for which dullness seems to be a qualification.

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.

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

He that loves reading has everything within his reach.

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.

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.

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.