Best quotes by William Godwin on Man

Checkout quotes by William Godwin on Man

• ‟ Law is made for man and not man for the law. Wherever we can be sure that the most valuable interests of a nation require that we should decide one way, that way we ought to decide.

  - William Godwin
  

• ‟ No man knows the value of innocence and integrity but he who has lost them.

  - William Godwin
  

• ‟ The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection.

  - William Godwin
  

• ‟ A just and a brave man acts fearlessly and with explicitness; he does not shun, but court, the scrutiny of mankind; he lives in the face of day, and the whole world confesses the clearness of his spirit and the rectitude of his conduct.

  - William Godwin
  

• ‟ 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
  

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

  - William Godwin
  

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

  - William Godwin
  

• ‟ The soul of man is one of those subtle and evanescent substances that, as long as they remain still, the organ of sight does not remark; it must become agitated to become visible.

  - William Godwin
  

• ‟ Innocence is not virtue. Virtue demands the active employment of an ardent mind in the promotion of the general good. No man can be eminently virtuous who is not accustomed to an extensive range of reflection.

  - William Godwin
  

• ‟ Man is a being of a mixed nature; and, as there is no integrity without its flaws, so is there no man so knavish but that in some things he may be trusted.

  - William Godwin
  

• ‟ 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.

  - William Godwin
  

• ‟ How different a creature is man in society and man in solitude!

  - William Godwin
  

• ‟ The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.

  - William Godwin