Life & Wisdom Quote by William Godwin

An ocean with no shore is less a landscape than a trap: endlessness dressed up as nature. Godwin’s line works because it refuses the comfort we usually smuggle into metaphors of the sea - the idea that vastness is sublime, cleansing, even democratic. Here, the water isn’t freedom; it’s disorientation. “Unfathomable” doubles the dread. It means bottomless, but it also means mentally ungraspable, as if the mind itself can’t get purchase. Then Godwin twists the knife with “without a shore,” stripping away the basic promise that any voyage implies: eventual arrival, a place to stand, a boundary that turns wandering into a story with an ending.

The pronoun “To him” matters. Godwin isn’t declaring a universal truth about existence; he’s staging a subjective crisis. Something is being perceived as infinite, and that perception is already a kind of isolation. The sentence quietly sketches a psychology of alienation: the world as overwhelming scale, the self as a lone observer floating in it.

Context sharpens the intent. Godwin, the radical Enlightenment novelist-philosopher, wrote amid political upheaval and moral arguments about reason’s power to remake society. The metaphor reads like a check on that confidence: what happens when rational systems, emotions, or historical forces expand beyond an individual’s capacity to map them? It’s a Romantic-sized image deployed with a cooler edge - not rapture, but the terror of limitlessness, where meaning doesn’t drown in tragedy so much as dissolve in sheer, indifferent space.