Best 153 quotes of Mary Wollstonecraft on MyQuotes

Mary Wollstonecraft

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    Age demands respect; youth, love.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    A king is always a king - and a woman always a woman: his authority and her sex ever stand between them and rational converse

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    A modest man is steady, an humble man timid, and a vain one presumptuous.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    An air of fashion, which is but a badge of slavery ... proves that the soul has not a strong individual character.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    And this homage to women's attractions has distorted their understanding tosuch an extent that almost all the civilized women of the present century are anxious only to inspire love, when they ought to have the nobler aim of getting respect for their abilities and virtues.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    An immoderate fondness for dress, for pleasure, and for sway, are the passions of savages; the passions that occupy those uncivilized beings who have not yet extended the dominion of the mind, or even learned to think with the energy necessary to concatenate that abstract train of thought which produces principles.... that women from their education and the present state of civilized life, are in the same condition, cannotbe controverted.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    As a sex, women are habitually indolent; and every thing tends to make them so.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    At boarding schools of every description, the relaxation of the junior boys is mischief; and of the senior, vice.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    At school boys become gluttons and slovens, and, instead of cultivating domestic affections, very early rush into the libertinism which destroys the constitution before it is formed; hardening the heart as it weakens the understanding.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    A war, or any wild-goose chase, is, as the vulgar use the phrase, a lucky turn-up of patronage for the minister, whose chief merit is the art of keeping himself in place.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    But women are very differently situated with respect to eachother - for they are all rivals (...) Is it then surprising that when the sole ambition of woman centres in beauty, and interest gives vanity additional force, perpetual rivalships should ensue? They are all running the same race, and would rise above the virtue of morals, if they did not view each other with a suspicious and even envious eye.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    Executions, far from being useful examples to the survivors, have, I am persuaded, a quite contrary effect, by hardening the heart they ought to terrify. Besides, the fear of an ignominious death, I believe, never deterred anyone from the commission of a crime, because in committing it the mind is roused to activity about present circumstances.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    For any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers; besides, even the productions that are only addressed to the imagination, raise the reader a little above the gross gratification of appetites, to which the mind has not given a shade of delicacy.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    For years I have endeavored to calm an impetuous tide -- laboring to make my feelings take an orderly course -- it was striving against the stream.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    Friendship and domestic happiness are continually praised; yet how little is there of either in the world, because it requires more cultivation of mind to keep awake affection, even in our own hearts, than the common run of people suppose.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time. The very reverse may be said of love. In a great degree, love and friendship cannot subsist in the same bosom; even when inspired by different objects they weaken or destroy each other, and for the same object can only be felt in succession. The vain fears and fond jealousies, the winds which fan the flame of love, when judiciously or artfully tempered, are both incompatible with the tender confidence and sincere respect of friendship.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    Good habits, imperceptibly fixed, are far preferable to the precepts of reason.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    Hereditary property sophisticates the mind, and the unfortunate victims to it ... swathed from their birth, seldom exert the locomotive faculty of body or mind; and, thus viewing every thing through one medium, and that a false one, they are unable to discern in what true merit and happiness consist.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    How frequently has melancholy and even misanthropy taken possession of me, when the world has disgusted me, and friends have proven unkind. I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    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.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind my wayward heart creates its own misery Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    I begin to love this little creature, and to anticipate his birth as a fresh twist to a knot, which I do not wish to untie.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    I begin to love this little creature, and to anticipate his birth as a fresh twist to a knot which I do not wish to untie. Men are spoilt by frankness, I believe, yet I must tell you that I love you better than I supposed I did, when I promised to love you forever....I feel it thrilling through my frame, giving and promising pleasure.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    I must be allowed to add some explanatory remarks to bring the subject home to reason-to that sluggish reason, which supinely takes opinions on trust, and obstinately supports them to spare itself the labour of thinking.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    In the education of women, the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    In this metropolis a number of lurking leeches infamously gain subsistence by practicing on the credulity of women.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    ...I scarcely am able to govern my muscles, when I see a man start with eager, and serious solicitude, to lift a handkerchief, orshut a door, when the lady could have done it herself, had she only moved a pace or two.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should be only organized dust.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organised dust - ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out, which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable - and life is more than a dream.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    I think I love most people best when they are in adversity; for pity is one of my prevailing passions.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    I think schools, as they are now regulated, the hot-beds of vice and folly, and the knowledge of human nature supposedly attained there, merely cunning selfishness.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain must be obtained by their charms and weaknesses.

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    Mary Wollstonecraft

    I write in a hurry, because the little one, who has been sleeping a long time, begins to call for me. Poor thing! when I am sad, I lament that all my affections grow on me, till they become too strong for my peace, though they all afford me snatches of exquisite enjoyment.