William Godwin Quotes - Page 3

It is probable that there is no one thing that it is of eminent importance for a child to learn. The true object of juvenile education, is to provide, against the age of five and twenty, a mind well regulated, active, and prepared to learn. Whatever will inspire habits of industry and observation, will sufficiently answer this purpose.

Power is not happiness. Security and peace are more to be desired than a name at which nations tremble.

The most desirable mode of education, is that which is careful that all the acquisitions of the pupil shall be preceded and accompanied by desire . . . The boy, like the man, studies because he desires it. He proceeds upon a plan of is own invention, or by which, by adopting, he has made his own. Everything bespeaks independence and inequality.

Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.

Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms.

One of the prerogatives by which man is eminently distinguished from all other living beings inhabiting this globe of earth, consists in the gift of reason.

Obey; this may be right; but beware of reverence.... Government is nothing but regulated force; force is its appropriate claim upon your attention. It is the business of individuals to persuade; the tendency of concentrated strength, is only to give consistency and permanence to an influence more compendious than persuasion.

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

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

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

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

Books are the depositary of everything that is most honourable to man.

The execution of any thing considerable implies in the first place previous persevering meditation.

It is probable that there is no one thing that it is of eminent importance for a child to learn.

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.

But the watchful care of the parent is endless. The youth is never free from the danger of grating interference.

The subtleties of mathematics defecate the grossness of our apprehension, and supply the elements of a sounder and severer logic.

The virtue of a human being is the application of his capacity to the general good.

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

There is no sphere in which a human being can be supposed to act where one mode of reasoning will not, in every given instance, be more reasonable than any other mode. That mode the being is bound by every principle of justice to pursue.

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

No maxim can be more pernicious than that which would teach us to consult the temper of the times, and to tell only so much as we imagine our contemporaries will be able to bear.

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.

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.

A celebrated north country apostle, who, after Calvin had damned ninety-nine in a hundred of mankind, had contrived a scheme for damning ninety-nine in a hundred of the followers of Calvin.