Quotes from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The agony of my feelings allowed me no respite; no incident occurred from which my rage and misery could not extract its food.

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

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

It is hardly surprising that women concentrate on the way they look instead of what was in their minds since not much has been put in their minds to begin with.

I am very averse to bringing myself forward in print, but as my account will only appear as an appendage to a former production, and as it will be confined to such topics as have connection with my authorship alone, I can hardly accuse myself of a personal intrusion.

The agony of my feelings allowed me no respite no incident occurred from which my rage and misery could not extract its food.

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

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

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.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.