Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
An air of fashion, which is but a badge of slavery ... proves that the soul has not a strong individual character.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
The air of fashion, which many young people are so eager to attain, always strikes me like the studied attitudes of some modern prints, copied with tasteless servility after the antigue; the soul is left out, and none of the parts are tied together by what may properly be termed character.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
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, Lodore
When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?
MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
Tranquility, allied to loneliness, possessed no charms.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, Lodore
Nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose — a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.
MARY SHELLEY, introduction, Frankenstein
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, Lodore
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.
MARY SHELLEY, The Last Man
A lofty sense of independence is, in man, the best privilege of his nature.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, Lodore
All judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer than that one guilty should escape.
MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
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, Lodore
We have had over-much of war: I have seen too many of the noble, young, and gallant, fall by the sword. Brute force has had its day; now let us try what policy can do.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck
The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.
MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
Our faults are apt to assume giant and exaggerated forms to our eyes in youth.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, Lodore
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, A Vindication of the Rights of Men
It was the part of a woman so to refine and educate her mind, as to be the cause of good alone to him whose fate depended on her smile.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, Lodore
Our feelings probably are not less strong at fifty than they were ten or fifteen years before; but they have changed their objects, and dwell on far different prospects. At five-and-thirty a man thinks of what his own existence is; when the maturity of age has grown into its autumn, he is wrapt up in that of others. The loss of wife or child then becomes more deplorable, as being impossible to repair; for no fresh connection can give us back the companion of our earlier years, nor a "new-sprung race" compensate for that, whose career we hoped to see run.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, Lodore
Ennui, the demon, waited at the threshold of his noiseless refuge, and drove away the stirring hopes and elivening expectations, which form the better part of life.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, Lodore
Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.
MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.
MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
The young are always in extremes.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, Lodore
I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.
MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
Once a king ... it was impossible, without risk of life, to sink to a private station.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck
Frankness and truth were reflected on her brow, like flowers in the clearest pool.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, Lodore
Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to a mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on a rock.
MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
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, Lodore
We could almost believe that we are destined by Providence to an unsettled position on the globe, so invariably is a love of change implanted in the young. It seems as if the eternal Lawgiver intended that, at a certain age, man should leave father, mother, and the dwelling of his infancy, to seek his fortunes over the wide world.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, Lodore
How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.
MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
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 SHELLEY, introduction, Frankenstein
