Top 380 Mary Shelley Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 8

51. “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

52. “Elegance is inferior to virtue.”

— Mary Shelley

53. “A solitary being is by instinct a wanderer...”

— Mary Shelley

54. “I could not understand why men who knew all about good and evil could hate and kill each other.”

— Mary Shelley

55. “There is something so different in Venice from any other place in the world, that you leave at once all accustomed habits and everyday sights to enter an enchanted garden.”

— Mary Shelley

56. “Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity and ruin.”

— Mary Shelley

57. “The moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding places.”

— Mary Shelley

58. “I am not a person of opinions because I feel the counter arguments too strongly.”

— Mary Shelley

59. “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

60. “Life is obstinate and clings closest where it is most hated.”

— Mary Shelley

61. “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

62. “Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded.”

— Mary Shelley

63. “Devil, do you dare approach me? and do you not fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head?”

— Mary Shelley

64. “From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition.”

— Mary Shelley

65. “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

66. “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?”

— Mary Shelley

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

— Mary Shelley

68. “Supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”

— Mary Shelley

69. “The agony of my feelings allowed me no respite; no incident occurred from which my rage and misery could not extract its food.”

— Mary Shelley

70. “I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.”

— Mary Shelley

71. “Tranquility, allied to loneliness, possessed no charms.”

— Mary Shelley

72. “It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being.”

— Mary Shelley

73. “The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature.”

— Mary Shelley

74. “But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be – a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others and intolerable to myself.”

— Mary Shelley

75. “Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!”

— Mary Shelley

76. “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

— Mary Shelley

77. “I saw no cause for their unhappiness, but I was deeply affected by it. If such lovely creatures were miserable, it was less strange that I, an imperfect and solitary being, should be wretched.”

— Mary Shelley

78. “How dreadful it is, to emerge from the oblivion of slumber, and to receive as a good morrow the mute wailing of one’s own hapless heart – to return from the land of deceptive dreams to the heavy knowledge of unchanged disaster!”

— Mary Shelley

79. “A lofty sense of independence is, in man, the best privilege of his nature.”

— Mary Shelley

80. “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel...”

— Mary Shelley

81. “How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.”

— Mary Shelley

82. “His conversation was marked by its happy abundance.”

— Mary Shelley

83. “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 Shelley

84. “I trembled, and my heart failed within me; when, on looking up, I saw, by the light of the moon, the daemon at the casement.”

— Mary Shelley

85. “Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder, and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature.”

— Mary Shelley

86. “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

87. “The time at length arrives, when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished.”

— Mary Shelley

88. “Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.”

— Mary Shelley

89. “The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.”

— Mary Shelley

90. “Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.”

— Mary Shelley

91. “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 Shelley

92. “When I step into the batter’s box, the fans, the noise, the cheers, they all disappear. For that moment, the world is just a battle between me and the pitcher. And more than anything, I want to win.”

— Mary Shelley

93. “All judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer than that one guilty should escape.”

— Mary Shelley

94. “Ah! it is well for the unfortunate to be resigned, but for the guilty there is no peace.”

— Mary Shelley

95. “The modern masters promise very little.”

— Mary Shelley

96. “None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science.”

— Mary Shelley

97. “Oh! What a miserable night I passed! The cold stars shone in mockery, and the bare trees waved their branches above me; now and then the sweet voice of a bird burst forth amidst the universal stillness. All, save I, were at rest or in enjoyment; I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me, and finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin.”

— Mary Shelley

98. “What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident.”

— Mary Shelley

99. “Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”

— Mary Shelley

100. “My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.”

— Mary Shelley