Mary Wollstonecraft Quotes on Mind

Quotes

• Attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft:

  “Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.”

• Attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft:

  “The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force.”

• Attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft:

  “Reason is, indeed, the only foundation of morality.”

• “Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world; and this is not a woman's province in a married state. Her sphere of action is not large, and if she is not taught to look into her own heart, how trivial are her occupations and pursuits! What little arts engross and narrow her mind!”

  Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), "Matrimony", p. 100

• “Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (1788; 1791)”

  Good habits, imperceptibly fixed, are far preferable to the precepts of reason ; but, as this task requires more judgment than generally falls to the lot of parents, substitutes must be sought for, and medicines given, when regimen would have answered the purpose much better. I believe those who examine their own minds, will readily agree with me, that reason, with difficulty, conquers settled hab

• “I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind — my wayward heart creates its own misery — Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child — long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.”

  Undated letter to Joseph Johnson (October? 1792), published in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (2004), edited by Janet Todd , p. 206.