Top 160 Mary Wollstonecraft Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

52. “Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

53. “We reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

54. “Women are degraded by the propensity to enjoy the present moment, and, at last, despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

55. “I never wanted but your heart – that gone, you have nothing more to give.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

56. “I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

57. “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.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

58. “Society can only be happy and free in proportion as it is virtuous.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

59. “She was created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

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

— Mary Wollstonecraft

61. “It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

62. “If then women are not a swarm of ephemeron triflers, why should they be kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence?”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

63. “Weakness may excite tenderness, and gratify the arrogant pride of man; but the lordly caresses of a protector will not gratify a noble mind that pants for, and deserves to be respected. Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

64. “If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

65. “Men neglect the duties incumbent on man, yet are treated like demi-gods; religion is also separated from morality by a ceremonial veil, yet men wonder that the world is almost, literally speaking, a den of sharpers or oppressors.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

66. “Thus Milton describes our first frail mother; though when he tells us that women are formed for softness and sweet attractive grace, I cannot comprehend his meaning, unless, in the true Mahometan strain, he meant to deprive us of souls, and insinuate that we were beings only designed by sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratify the senses of man when he can no longer soar on the wing of contemplation.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

67. “When poverty is more disgraceful than even vice, is not morality cut to the quick?”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

68. “I presume that RATIONAL men will excuse me for endeavouring to persuade them to become more masculine and respectable.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

69. “Those who are bold enough to advance before the age they live in... must learn to brave censure.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

70. “Rousseau declares, that a woman should never, for a moment feel herself independent, that she should be governed by fear to exercise her NATURAL cunning, and made a coquetish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a SWEETER companion to man, whenever he chooses to relax himself.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

71. “The power of generalizing ideas, of drawing comprehensive conclusions from individual observations, is the only acquirement, for an immortal being, that really deserves the name of knowledge.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

72. “The last man! Yes I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me...”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

73. “Rousseau exerts himself to prove that all was right originally: a crowd of authors that all is now right: and I, that all will be right.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

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

— Mary Wollstonecraft

75. “When a man seduces a woman, it should, I think, be termed a left-handed marriage.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

76. “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, then by my example, how dangerous is the pursuit of knowledge and how much happier is that man who believes his native town to be the world than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

77. “Consequently, the most perfect education, in my opinion, is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart; or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent. In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

78. “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.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

79. “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.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

80. “Men, indeed, appear to me to act in a very unphilosophical manner when they try to secure the good conduct of women by attempting to keep them always in a state of childhood.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

81. “All the sacred rights of humanity are violated by insisting on blind obedience.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

82. “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.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

83. “A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

84. “Love, from its very nature, must be transitory.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

85. “I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for, wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, nor in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart. – I shall be employed about things, not words!”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

86. “Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated, or justify the authority that chains such a weak being to her duty.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

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

— Mary Wollstonecraft

88. “The being who patiently endures injustice, and silently bears insults, will soon become unjust, or unable to discern right from wrong.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

89. “In the name of truth and common sense, why should not one woman acknowledge that she can take more exercise than another? or, in other words, that she has a sound constitution; and why to damp innocent vivacity, is she darkly to be told, that men will draw conclusions which she little thinks of? Let the libertine draw what inference he pleases; but, I hope, that no sensible mother will restrain the natural frankness of youth, by instilling such indecent cautions.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

90. “Pygmalion formed an ivory maid, and longed for an informing soul. She, on the contrary, combined all the qualities of a hero’s mind, and fate presented a statue in which she might enshrine them.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

91. “Why is our fancy to be appalled by terrific perspectives of a hell beyond the grave?”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

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

— Mary Wollstonecraft

93. “This spirit of inquiry is the characteristic of the present century, from which the succeeding will, I am persuaded, receive a great accumulation of knowledge; and doubtless its diffusion will in a great measure destroy the factitious national characters which have been supposed permanent, though only rendered so by the permanency of ignorance.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

94. “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.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

95. “Obedience, unconditional obedience, is the catch-word of tyrants of every description, and to render ‘assurance doubly sure,’ one kind of despotism supports another.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

96. “When any prevailing prejudice is attacked, the wise will consider, and leave the narrow-minded to rail with thoughtless vehemence at innovation.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

97. “Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but, as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants, and sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only want slaves, and the latter a play-thing. The sensualist, indeed, has been the most dangerous of tyrants, and women have been duped by their lovers, as princes by their ministers, whilst dreaming that they reigned over them.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

98. “The most holy band of society is friendship. It has been well said, by a shrewd satirist, “that rare as true love is, true friendship is still rarer.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

99. “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.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft

100. “So ludicrous, in fact, do these ceremonies appear to me, that I scarcely am able to govern my muscles, when I see a man start with eager, and serious solicitude to lift a handkerchief, or shut a door, when the LADY could have done it herself, had she only moved a pace or two.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft