Mary Shelley Quotes

149 Sourced Quotes

I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy.

Mary Shelley
I am an unfortunate and deserted creature, I look around and I have no relation or friend upon earth. These amiable people to whom I go have never seen me and know little of me. I am full of fears, for if I fail there, I am an outcast in the world forever.

Mary Shelley
Lord Byron, who was writing the third canto of Childe Harold, was the only one among us who put his thoughts upon paper. These, as he brought them successively to us, clothed in all the light and harmony of poetry, seemed to stamp as divine the glories of heaven and earth, whose influences we partook with him.

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

Mary Shelley
None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science.

Mary Shelley
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 Shelley
We are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves — such a friend ought to be — do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures.

Mary Shelley
Marriage is usually considered the grave, and not the cradle of love.

Mary Shelley
He is dead who called me into being, and when I shall be no more the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish.

Mary Shelley
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
My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.

Mary Shelley
The ambition of the enquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.

Mary Shelley
I cherished hope, it is true, but it vanished when my person reflected...

Mary Shelley
I leave a sad and bitter world; and if you remember me, and think of me as of one unjustly condemned, I am resigned to the fate awaiting me.

Mary Shelley
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 Shelley
Solitude becomes a sort of tangible enemy, the more dangerous, because it dwells within the citadel itself.

Mary Shelley
Our faults are apt to assume giant and exaggerated forms to our eyes in youth.

Mary Shelley
A man would make but a very sorry chemist if he attended to that department of human knowledge alone. 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 Shelley
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 Shelley
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 Shelley
I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation...

Mary Shelley
I heard the rumbling thunder of the falling avalanche and marked the smoke of its passage.

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

Mary Shelley
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 Shelley
The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own defence before they are condemned.

Mary Shelley
And the violet lay dead while the odour flew On the wings of the wind o'er the waters blue.

Mary Shelley
I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and 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; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs...

Mary Shelley
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 Shelley
From my birth I have aspired like the eagle - but unlike the eagle, my wings have failed.... Congratulate me then that I have found a fitting scope for my powers.

Mary Shelley
Chemistry is that branch of natural philosophy in which the greatest improvements have been and may be made.

Mary Shelley