Date: 1792

"Yet disappointed as we are, in our researches, the mind gains strength by the exercise, sufficient, perhaps, to comprehend the answers which, in another step of existence, it may receive to the anxious questions it asked, when the understanding with feeble wing was fluttering round the visible e...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"The passions also, the winds of life, would be useless, if not injurious, did the substance which composes our thinking being, after we have thought in vain, only become the support of vegetable life, and invigorate a cabbage, or blush in a rose."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"The business of education in this case, is only to conduct the shooting tendrils to a proper pole; yet after laying precept upon precept, without allowing a child to acquire judgement itself, parents expect them to act in the same manner by this borrowed fallacious light, as if they had illumina...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"The understanding, it is true, may keep us from going out of drawing when we group our thoughts, or transcribe from the imagination and warm sketches of fancy; but the animal spirits, the individual character, give the colouring."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"Like the lightning's flash are many recollections; one idea assimilating and explaining another, with astonishing rapidity."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"These are the glowing minds that concentrate pictures for their fellow creatures; forcing them to view with interest the objects reflected from the impassioned imagination, which they passed over in nature."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"For it is the right use of reason alone which makes us independent of everything--excepting the unclouded reason--'Whose service is perfect freedom.'"

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"In fact, behaviour in most circumstances is now so much thought of, that simplicity of character is rarely seen: yet, if men were only anxious to cultivate each virtue, and let it take root firmly in the mind, the grace resulting from it, its natural exterior mark, would soon strip affectation a...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"If I, he may thus argue, who exercise my own mind, and have been refined by tribulation, find the serpent's egg in some fold of my heart, and crush it with difficulty, shall I not pity those who have stamped with less vigour, or who have heedlessly nurtured the insidious reptile till it poisoned...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"No, no! The agonised heart will cry with suffocating impatience--I, too, am a man! and have vices hid perhaps, from human eye, that bend me to the dust before God, and loudly tell me, when all is mute, that we are formed of the same earth, and breathe the same element."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)