Top 380 Mary Shelley Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “In my joy I thrust my hand into the live embers, but quickly drew it out with a cry of pain. How strange, I thought that the same cause should produce such opposite effects.”

— Mary Shelley

102. “My life, as it passes thus, was indeed hateful to me, and it was during sleep alone that I could taste joy. O blessed sleep!”

— Mary Shelley

103. “The young are always in extremes.”

— Mary Shelley

104. “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.”

— Mary Shelley

105. “My daily vows rose for revenge – a deep and deadly revenge, such as would alone compensate for the outrages and anguish I had endured.”

— Mary Shelley

106. “After days and nights of incredible labor and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life. Nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.”

— Mary Shelley

107. “But her’s was the misery of innocence, which, like a cloud that passes over the fair moon, for a while hides, but cannot tarnish its brightness.”

— Mary Shelley

108. “My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine.”

— Mary Shelley

109. “Satan has his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and detested.”

— Mary Shelley

110. “You seek for knowledge and wisdom as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been.”

— Mary Shelley

111. “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

112. “I feel exquisite pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self.”

— Mary Shelley

113. “Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and the Mammon of the world.”

— Mary Shelley

114. “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

115. “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a 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.”

— Mary Shelley

116. “I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be in formed of the secret with which I am acquainted. That cannot be.”

— Mary Shelley

117. “In other studies you go as far as other have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.”

— Mary Shelley

118. “If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us.”

— Mary Shelley

119. “My affection for my guest increases every day. He excites at once my admiration and pity to an astonishing degree. How can I see so noble a creature destroyed by misery without feeling the most poignant grief? He is so gentle, yet so wise; his mind is so cultivated; when he speaks, although his words are culled with the choicest art, yet they flow with rapidity and unparalleled eloquence.”

— Mary Shelley

120. “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

121. “When one creature is murdered, another is immediately deprived of life in a slow, torturing manner; then the executioners, their hands yet reeking with the blood of innocence, believe that they have done a great deed. They call this retribution. Hateful name! When that word is pronounced, I know greater and more horrid punishments are going to be inflicted than the gloomiest tyrant has ever invented to satiate his utmost revenge.”

— Mary Shelley

122. “When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?”

— Mary Shelley

123. “You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.”

— Mary Shelley

124. “All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou are bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.”

— Mary Shelley

125. “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

126. “We never do what we wish when we wish it, and when we desire a thing earnestly, and it does arrive, that or we are changed, so that we slide from the summit of our wishes and find ourselves where we were.”

— Mary Shelley

127. “At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification.”

— Mary Shelley

128. “Ennui, the demon, waited at the threshold of his noiseless refuge, and drove away the stirring hopes and enlivening expectations, which form the better part of life.”

— Mary Shelley

129. “Could I behold this and live? Alas! Life is obstinate and clings closest where it is most hated.”

— Mary Shelley

130. “Oh! Stars and clouds and winds, ye are all about to mock me; if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart, depart, and leave me in darkness.”

— Mary Shelley

131. “It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”

— Mary Shelley

132. “My spirits were elevated by the enchanting appearance of nature; the past was blotted from my memory, the present was tranquil, and the future glided by bright rays of hope, and anticipations of joy.”

— Mary Shelley

133. “Standing armies can never consist of resolute robust men; they may be well-disciplined machines, but they will seldom contain men under the influence of strong passions, or with very vigorous faculties.”

— Mary Shelley

134. “Sorrow only increased with knowledge.”

— Mary Shelley

135. “I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans.”

— Mary Shelley

136. “I am required not only to raise the spirits of others, but sometimes to sustain my own, when theirs are failing.”

— Mary Shelley

137. “Farewell! I leave you, and in you the last of human kind whom these eyes will ever behold. Farewell, Frankenstein! If thou wert yet alive, and yet cherished a desire of revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than in my destruction.”

— Mary Shelley

138. “Unhappy man! Do you share my maddness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me; let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!”

— Mary Shelley

139. “I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.”

— Mary Shelley

140. “But it was all a dream; no Eve soothed my sorrows, nor shared my thoughts; I was alone. I remembered Adam’s supplication to his Creator. But where was mine!? He had abandoned me, and in the bitterness of my heart, I cursed him.”

— Mary Shelley

141. “Solitude becomes a sort of tangible enemy, the more dangerous, because it dwells within the citadel itself.”

— Mary Shelley

142. “What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.”

— Mary Shelley

143. “Truly disappointment is the guardian deity of human life; she sits at the threshold of unborn time, and marshals the events as they come forth.”

— Mary Shelley

144. “Like Adam, I was created apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect.”

— Mary Shelley

145. “Happiness is in its highest degree the sister of goodness.”

— Mary Shelley

146. “I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”

— Mary Shelley

147. “My feelings became calmer, if it may be called calmness when the violence of rage sinks into the depths of despair.”

— Mary Shelley

148. “Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

— Mary Shelley

149. “The labours I endured were no longer to be alleviated by the bright sun or gentle breezes of spring; all joy was but a mockery, which insulted my desolate state, and made me feel more painfully that I was not made for the enjoyment of pleasure.”

— Mary Shelley

150. “I am unstable, sometimes melancholy, and have been called on some occasions imperious; but I never did an ungenerous act in my life. I sympathise warmly with others, and have wasted my heart in their love.”

— Mary Shelley