Mary Wollstonecraft Quotes
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.
The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force.
An air of fashion, which is but a badge of slavery ... proves that the soul has not a strong individual character.
The endeavor to keep alive any hoary establishment beyond its natural date is often pernicious and always useless.
The last man! Yes I may well describe that solitary being's feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.
The conduct of an accountable being must be regulated by the operations of its own reason.
I think schools, as they are now regulated, the hot-beds of vice and folly, and the knowledge of human nature supposedly attained there, merely cunning selfishness.
It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature.
When man, governed by reasonable laws, enjoys his natural freedom, let him despise woman, if she do not share it with him.
The birthright of man ... is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact.
I could not understand why men who knew all about good and evil could hate and kill each other.
When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?
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.
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
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.
Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and the Mammon of the world.
The careful rearer of the ductile human plant can instil his own religion, and surround the soul by such a moral atmosphere, as shall become to its latest day the air it breathes.
What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident.
After days and nights of incredible labor and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life. Nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.
Once a king ... it was impossible, without risk of life, to sink to a private station.
It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being
A lofty sense of independence is, in man, the best privilege of his nature.