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

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Examine
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More quotes by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

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Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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One man's life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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But he found that a traveller's life is one that includes much pain amidst its enjoyments. His feelings are for ever on the stretch and when he begins to sink into repose, he finds himself obliged to quit that on which he rests in pleasure for something new, which again engages his attention, and which also he forsakes for other novelties.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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Her countenance was all expression her eyes were not dark but impenetrably deep you seemed to discover space after space in their intellectual glance.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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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 Wollstonecraft Shelley
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Life is obstinate and clings closest where it is most hated.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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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. - Frankenstein p115
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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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 Wollstonecraft Shelley
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When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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All judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer than that one guilty should escape.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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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
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I feel exquisite pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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In my joy I thrust my hand into the live embers, but quickly drew it out with a cry of pain. How strange, I thought that the same cause should produce such opposite effects.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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It is hardly surprising that women concentrate on the way they look instead of what is in their minds since not much has been put in their minds to begin with.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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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
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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.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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Allow me now to return to the cottagers, whose story excited in me such various feelings of indignation, delight, and wonder, but which all terminated in additional love and reverence for my protectors (for so I loved, in an innocent, half painful self-deceit, to call them).
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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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.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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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