198 Quotes by William Godwin

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.

The true key of the universe is love.

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

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.

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.

The mind of a child is no less vagrant than his steps; it pursues the gossamer and flies from object to object, lawless and unconfined, and it is equally necessary to the development of his frame that his thoughts and his body should be free from fetters.

In contemplation and reverie, one thought introduces another perpetually; and it is by similarity, or the hooking of one upon the other, that the process of thinking is carried on.

Perhaps the majority of human beings never think of standing by themselves, and choosing their own employments, till the sentence has been regularly promulgated to them, 'It is time for you to take care of yourself.'

There are so many ways in which the heart of man conceals itself from man!