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)

Date: 1792

"The human mind is built of nobler materials than to be easily corrupted."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"False, indeed, must be the light when the drapery of situation hides the man, and makes him stalk in masquerade, dragging from one scene of dissipation to another the nerveless limbs that hang with stupid listlessness, and rolling round the vacant eye, which plainly tells us that there is no min...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"Hereditary property sophisticates the mind, and the unfortunate victims to it--if I may so express myself--swathed from their birth, seldom exert that locomotive faculty or body of mind"

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"For it is seldom done entirely, to speak with moderation, by the child itself; thus the master countenances falsehood, or winds the poor machine up to some extraordinary exertion, that injures the wheels, and stops the gradual improvement."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)