My temper is of a recluse and contemplative cast; had it been otherwise, I should, perhaps, on some former occasions, have entered into the active concerns of the world and not have been connected with it merely as a writer of books.
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.
The true object of moral and political disquisition is pleasure or happiness.
We cannot perform our tasks to the best of our power, unless we think well of our own capacity.
During my academical life, and from this time forward, I was indefatigable in my search after truth. I read all the authors of greatest repute, for and against the Trinity, original sin, and the most disputed doctrines, but I was not yet of an understanding sufficiently ripe for impartial decision, and all my inquiries terminated in Calvinism.
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.
England has been called, with great felicity of conception, 'the land of liberty and good sense.' We have preserved many of the advantages of a free people, which the nations of the Continent have long since lost.
Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.
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.
There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination.
The evils that arise to us from the structure of the material universe are neither trivial nor few, yet the history of political society sufficiently shows that man is, of all other beings, the most formidable enemy to man.
The extent of our progress in the cultivation of knowledge is unlimited.
The great model of the affection of love in human beings is the sentiment which subsists between parents and children.
Study with desire is real activity; without desire it is but the semblance and mockery of activity.
The execution of any thing considerable implies in the first place previous persevering meditation.
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.
Perseverance is an active principle, and cannot continue to operate but under the influence of desire.
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.
Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny.
God is a being who is himself the cause of his own existence. His prerogative is to perceive before there was anything to be perceived. He is the creator of the universe; He operated upon nothing and turned it into something.
If a thing be really good, it can be shown to be such.
How are the faculties of man to be best developed and his happiness secured? The state of a king is not favorable to this, nor the state of the noble and rich men of the earth. All this is artificial life, the inventions of vanity and grasping ambition, by which we have spoiled the man of nature and of pure, simple, and undistorted impulses.
Was ever a great discovery prosecuted or an important benefit conferred upon the human race by him who was incapable of standing and thinking and feeling alone?
Human depravity originates in the vices of political constitution.
A world of derived beings, an immense, wide creation, requires an extended scale with various ranks and orders of existence.
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.
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.
Extraordinary circumstances often bring along with them extraordinary strength. No man knows, till the experiment, what he is capable of effecting.
The love of independence and dislike of unjust treatment is the source of a thousand virtues.
The man who plays his part upon the theatre of life almost always maintains what may be called an artificial character.
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.
In the two novels I have published, it was my fortune at different times, and from different persons, to hear the most unqualified censure long before it was possible for me to hear the voice of the public. But my temper was not altered, nor my courage subdued.
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.
Harshness and unkindness are relative. The appearance of them may be the fruits of the greatest kindness.
It is indeed specially characteristic of the passion of love that it has the faculty of giving a perpetual flow to the interchange of sentiments and reflections in conversation.
I was brought up in great tenderness, and though my mind was proud to independence, I was never led to much independence of feeling.