Quotes by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
“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.””
“A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.””
Mary Wollstonecraft ShelleyMary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an influential English novelist best known for her groundbreaking work, "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus," published in 1818. This novel is often regarded as on...