Quotes from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

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!

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

A lofty sense of independence is, in man, the best privilege of his nature.

One man's life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought

Man," I cried, "how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom!

Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!

The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.

Even the eternal skies weep, I thought; is there any shame then, that mortal man should spend himself in tears?

. . . the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.

Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and the Mammon of the world.

Happiness is in its highest degree the sister of goodness.

Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.

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.

The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.

The very winds whispered in soothing accents, and maternal Nature bade me weep no more.

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

...if I see but one smile on your lips when we meet, occasioned by this or any other exertion of mine, I shall need no other happiness.

To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death.

Life is obstinate and clings closest where it is most hated.

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

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

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.

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.