Date: 1831

"On set occasions and at appropriate times we examine our stores, and ascertain the various commodities we have, laid up in our presses and our coffers. Like the governor of a fort in time of peace, which was erected to keep out a foreign assailant, we occasionally visit our armoury, and take acc...

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"In the ruminations of the inner man, and the dissecting our thoughts and desires, we employ our intellectual arithmetic, we add, and subtract, and multiply, and divide, without asking the aid, without adverting to the existence, of our joints and members"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"Hence arises the notion, which has been entertained ever since the birth of reflection and logical discourse in the world, and which in some faint and confused degree exists probably even among savages, that the body is the prison of the mind"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

Anaxarchus when "ordered by Nicocreon, tyrant of Salamis, to be pounded in a mortar [...] in contempt of his mortal sufferings, exclaimed, 'Beat on, tyrant! thou dost but strike upon the case of Anaxarchus; thou canst not touch the man himself'"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

In poetry we are "privileged occasionally to cast away the slough and exuviæ of the body from incumbering and dishonouring us, even as Ulysses passed over his threshold, stripped of the rags that had obscured him, while Minerva enlarged his frame, and gave loftiness to his stature, a...

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"The mind is so infinitely superior in character to this case of flesh that incloses it, that he cannot persuade himself that it and the body perish together"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"He does not think it worth his while under these circumstances, to 'gird up the loins of his mind.'"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

Helvetius's creed is that men are born equal and "it depends upon education only, in the largest sense of that word, including every impression that may be made upon the mind, intentional or accidental, from the hour of our birth, whether we shall be poets or philosophers, dancers or singers, che...

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"In this sense a numerous school is, to a degree that can scarcely be adequately described, the slaughter-house of mind."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

Teaching in a crowded school is "like the undertaking, related by Livy, of Accius Navius, the augur, to cut a whetstone with a razor ... the sharpness of human faculties, is so blunted and destroyed"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)