Life & Wisdom Quote by William Godwin

Perseverance, for Godwin, isn’t a Victorian virtue badge you pin on your lapel; it’s a mechanism with a power source. Calling it an “active principle” strips away the pious idea that endurance is just character, just grit, just a stoic posture you adopt. Active means it does work in the world. It moves. It chooses. And like any engine, it doesn’t run on empty. The fuel is desire.

That framing is quietly polemical. Godwin was writing in the wake of revolution-era arguments about reason, human perfectibility, and the institutions that claim to govern human behavior. If perseverance depends on desire, then moral lectures and social punishment are blunt instruments. You don’t get sustained effort by commanding it; you get it by cultivating wants - by shaping what people are allowed to imagine, pursue, and feel entitled to. The subtext is radical: change the conditions that produce desire (education, liberty, economic security), and you change what people can persist at.

The line also tweaks the Enlightenment fantasy that reason alone can pilot the self. Godwin, often cast as a rationalist, concedes that willpower isn’t a free-floating faculty. “Cannot continue to operate” implies burnout, drift, the predictable collapse of dutiful striving when it’s disconnected from lived motivation. He’s warning against reform movements, relationships, even personal ethics built on pure obligation: they look noble at the start, then die of emotional starvation.

In modern terms, it’s an anti-hustle maxim with teeth. Perseverance isn’t a personality trait; it’s a relationship between a person and a purpose they actually want.