Mary Shelley Quotes

149 Sourced Quotes

So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein — more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

Mary Shelley
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 Shelley
It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being

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

Mary Shelley
From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition.

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

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

Mary Shelley
Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man.

Mary Shelley
What is there so fearful as the expectation of evil tidings delayed?... Misery is a more welcome visitant when she comes in her darkest guise and wraps us in perpetual black, for then the heart no longer sickens with disappointed hope.

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

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

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

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

Mary Shelley