Frankenstein: The Original 1818 Unabridged and Complete Edition (A Mary Shelley Classics)

by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand.

I said in one of my letters, my dear Margaret, that I should find no friend on the wide ocean; yet I have found a man who, before his spirit had been broken by misery, I should have been happy to have possessed as the brother of my heart.

they seemed to draw inexhaustible stores of affection from a very mine of love to bestow them upon me.

It was my temper to avoid a crowd and to attach myself fervently to a few.

Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by such slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity or ruin.

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. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.

Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.