Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Quotes

It was very different when the masters of science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.

...learn from my miseries, and do not seek to increase your own.

Live, and be happy, and make others so.

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.

I feel exquisite pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self.

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

I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be in formed of the secret with which I am acquainted. That cannot be.

Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!

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.

Truly disappointment is the guardian deity of human life; she sits at the threshold of unborn time, and marshals the events as they come forth.

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

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

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.

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.

I saw no cause for their unhappiness, but I was deeply affected by it. If such lovely creatures were miserable, it was less strange that I, an imperfect and solitary being, should be wretched.

From my birth I have aspired like the eagle - but unlike the eagle, my wings have failed. . . . Congratulate me then that I have found a fitting scope for my powers.

My candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open.

I leave a sad and bitter world; and if you remember me, and think of me as of one unjustly condemned, I am resigned to the fate awaiting me.

There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.

A solitary being is by instinct a wanderer.

Ennui, the demon, waited at the threshold of his noiseless refuge, and drove away the stirring hopes and enlivening expectations, which form the better part of life.

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.