Top 100 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Quotes
#1. The atomic bomb which we dropped on the people of Hiroshima was first envisioned by a woman, not a man. She was, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. She didn't call it an "atomic bomb." She called it "the monster of Frankenstein.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#2. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (whose mother died ten days after she was born) wrote a novel that anticipates Semmelweis's discovery and serves as a parable for the destructive power of decaying matter.
Laura Mullen
#3. His conversation was full of imagination, and very often in limitation of ther Persian, and Arabic writers, he invented tales of wonderful fancy and passion. At other times he repeated my fsvorite poems or drew me out into arguments, wich he suported with great ingenuity.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#5. the master of this person of an excellent disposition. And is remarkable in the ship for his gentleness,and the mildness of his disipline... added to his well known integrity and dauntless courage, made me desirious to engage him.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#9. Yes," she thought, "nature is the refuge and home for women: they have no public career - no aim nor end beyond their domestic circle; but they can extend that, and make all the creations of nature their own, to foster and do good to.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#10. 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.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#11. About half an hour afterwards he attempted again to speak, but was unable; he pressed my hand feebly, and his eyes closed for ever, while the irradiation of a gentle smile passed away from his lips.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#12. And I call on you, spirits of the dead, and on you, wandering ministers of vengeance, to aid and conduct me in my work. Let
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#13. It was, perhaps, the amiable character of this man that inclined me more to that branch of natural philosophy which he professed, than an intrinsic love for the science itself.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#14. There are some souls, bright and precious, which, like gold and silver, may be subdued by the fiery trial, and yield to new moulds; but there are others, pure and solid as the diamond, which may be shivered to pieces, yet in every fragment retain their indelible characteristics.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#16. There, Margaret, the sun is forever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There - for with your leave,
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#18. 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.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#21. The instructor can scarcely give sensibility where it is essentially wanting, nor talent to the unpercipient block. But he can cultivate and direct the affections of the pupil, who puts forth, as a parasite, tendrils by which to cling, not knowing to what - to a supporter or a destroyer.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#22. 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.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#23. It was not in her nature to stop short at half-measures, not to pause when once she had fixed her purpose. If she ever trembled on looking forward to the utter ruin she was about to encounter, her second emotion was to despise herself for such pusillanimity, and to be roused to renewed energy.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#25. Those moral laws on which all human excellence is founded - a love of truth in ourselves, and a sincere sympathy with our fellow-creatures.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#26. She saw and marked the revolutions that had been, and the present seemed to her only a point of rest, from which time was to renew his flight.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#27. I was like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead, and found a passage to life aided only by one glimmering, and seemingly ineffectual, light. I
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#28. I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror, such as the deed which he had now done, nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave and forced to destroy all that was dear to me.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#29. It is a strange feeling for a girl when first she finds the power put into her hand of influencing the destiny of another to happiness or misery. She is like a magician holding for the first time a fairy wand, not having yet had experience of its potency.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#30. what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#32. When I step into the batter's box, the fans, the noise, the cheers, they all disappear. For that moment, the world is just a battle between me and the pitcher. And more than anything, I want to win.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#33. My internal being was in a state of insurrection and turmoil; I felt that order would thence arise, but I had no power to produce it. By
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#34. How dreadful it is, to emerge from the oblivion of slumber, and to receive as a good morrow the mute wailing of one's own hapless heart - to return from the land of deceptive dreams to the heavy knowledge of unchanged disaster!
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#35. Oh! grief is fantastic; it weaves a web on which to trace the history of its woe from every form and change around; it incorporates itself with all living nature; it finds sustenance in every object; as light, it fills all things, and, like light, it gives its own colors to all.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#36. He felt that every sorrow was less than that which separation must produce; and that to share adversity with her was greater happiness than the enjoyment prosperity apart from her.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#37. 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.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#38. Spring advanced rapidly; the weather became fine, and the skies cloudless. It surprised me that what before was desert and gloomy should now bloom with the most beautiful flowers and verdure. My senses were gratified and refreshed by a thousand scents of delight, and a thousand sights of beauty.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#39. What is the world, except that which we feel? Love, and hope, and delight, or sorrow and tears; these are our lives, our realities, to which we give the names of power, possession, misfortune, and death.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#40. For the first time she knew and loved the Spirit of good and beauty, an affinity to which affords the greatest bliss that our nature can receive.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#41. Men become cannibals of their own hearts; remorse, regret, and restless impatience usurp the place of more wholesome feeling: every thing seems better than that which is.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#42. new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve their's.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#44. God blesses all things," she thought, "and he will also bless me. Much wrong have I done, but love pure and disinterested is in my heart, and I shall be repaid.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#45. Alas! Victor, when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness? I feel as if I were walking on the edge of a precipice, towards which thousands are crowding, and endeavouring to plunge me into the abyss.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#47. The moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding places.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#48. Richard, marked for misery and defeat, acknowledged that power which sentiment possesses to exalt us - to convince us that our minds, endowed with a soaring, restless aspiration, can find no repose on earth except in love.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#50. There is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, interwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#54. 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.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#56. My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child's blindness, added to a student's thirst for knowledge.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#57. Even the eternal skies weep, I thought; is there any shame then, that mortal man should spend himself in tears?
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#59. Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and the Mammon of the world.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#60. To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#61. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived. I
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#62. You have not studied the histories of ancient times, and perhaps know not the life that breathes in them; a soul of beauty and wisdom which had penetrated my heart of hearts.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#63. Anguish and despair had penetrated into the core of my heart; I bore a hell within me, which nothing could extinguish.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#66. Standing armies can never consist of resolute robust men; they may be well-disciplined machines, but they will seldom contain men under the influence of strong passions, or with very vigorous faculties.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#67. 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.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#69. Look forward to future years, if not with eager anticipation, yet with a calm reliance upon the power of good, wholly remote from despair.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#70. My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.
Mary Shelley
#73. The sentiment of immediate loss in some sort decayed, while that of utter, irremediable loneliness grew on me with time.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#75. 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.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#76. If your wish is to become really a man of science and not merely a petty experimentalist, I should advise you to apply to every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#77. You have destroyed the work which you began; what is it that you intend? Do you dare to break your promise? I have endured toil and misery; I
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#80. The sun might shine or the clouds might lower, but nothing could appear to me as it had done the day before.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#83. human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#84. 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.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#86. He is eloquent and persuasive; and once his words had even power over my heart: but trust him not. His soul is as hellish as his form, full of treachery and fiend-like malice. Hear him not; call
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#87. Solitude becomes a sort of tangible enemy, the more dangerous, because it dwells within the citadel itself.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#92. All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou are bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#93. 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 ...
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#94. I wish to soothe him; yet can I counsel one so infinitely miserable, so destitute of every hope of consolation, to live?
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#95. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly: That's not so ignorant after all. There are two monsters in my story, not one And one of them, the scientist, is indeed named Frankenstein.
Kurt Vonnegut
#97. 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,
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#98. I clung to my ferocious habits, yet half despised them; I continued my war against civilization, and yet entertained a wish to belong to it.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#100. avoided explanation, and maintained a continual silence concerning the wretch I had created. I had a feeling that I should be supposed mad, and this for ever chained my tongue, when I would have given the whole world to have confided the fatal secret.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
