Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Quotes

Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity and ruin.

Curiosity, earnest research to learn the hidden laws of nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they unfolded to me, are among the earliest sensations I can remember.

It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason.

Tranquility, allied to loneliness, possessed no charms.

Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.

None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science.

There is something so different in Venice from any other place in the world, that you leave at once all accustomed habits and everyday sights to enter an enchanted garden.

Unhappy man! Do you share my maddness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me; let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!

And the violet lay dead while the odour flew On the wings of the wind o'er the waters blue.

I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?

I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

With how many things are we on the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.

Oh! Stars and clouds and winds, ye are all about to mock me; if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart, depart, and leave me in darkness.

I cherished hope, it is true, but it vanished when my person reflected . . .

From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition.

Our faults are apt to assume giant and exaggerated forms to our eyes in youth.

We are fashioned creatures, but half made up. - Victor Frankenstein

Satan has his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and detested.

It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn.

The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature.

...we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves - such a friend ought to be - do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures.

The time at length arrives, when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished.

Supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

marriage is usually considered the grave, and not the cradle of love.

But soon, I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct.

In my joy I thrust my hand into the live embers, but quickly drew it out with a cry of pain. How strange, I thought that the same cause should produce such opposite effects.

But her's was the misery of innocence, which, like a cloud that passes over the fair moon, for a while hides, but cannot tarnish its brightness.

Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.

The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.

I required kindness and sympathy, but I did not believe myself utterly unworthy of it.

I, a miserable wretch, haunted by a curse that shut up every avenue to enjoyment.

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. The sun might shine, or the clouds might lour: but nothing could appear to me as it had done the day before.

I could not understand why men who knew all about good and evil could hate and kill each other.

He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.

My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading.

When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?

The world was to me a secret which I desired to devine.

Evil thenceforth became my good.

Solitude becomes a sort of tangible enemy, the more dangerous, because it dwells within the citadel itself.

At the age of twenty six I am in the condition of an aged person - all my old friends are gone... & my heart fails when I think by how few ties I hold to the world.

Look forward to future years, if not with eager anticipation, yet with a calm reliance upon the power of good, wholly remote from despair.

In other studies you go as far as other have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.

The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality.

Everything must have a beginning ... and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.

My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.

He is dead who called me into being, and when I shall be no more the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish.

Precious attribute of woe-worn humanity! that can snatch ecstatic emotion, even from under the very share and harrow, that ruthlessly ploughs up and lays waste every hope.

My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child's blindness, added to a student's thirst for knowledge.

I trembled, and my heart failed within me; when, on looking up, I saw, by the light of the moon, the daemon at the casement.

The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own defence before they are condemned.