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A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Quotes
Solitude and reflection are necessary to give to wishes the force of passions.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Love from its very nature must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant would be as wild a search as for the philosopher’s stone or the grand panacea: and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious to mankind. The most holy band of society is friendship.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Nature in everything demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom violate them with impunity.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Let us eat, drink, and love for tomorrow we die, would be in fact the language of reason, the morality of life; and who but a fool would part with a reality for a fleeting shadow?
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
[I]f we revert to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Few, I believe, have had much affection for mankind, who did not first love their parents, their brothers, sisters, and even the domestic brutes, whom they first played with.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
What but a pestilential vapour can hover over society when its chief director is only instructed in the invention of crimes, or the stupid routine of childish ceremonies?
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him the gift of reason?In this style, argue tyrants of every denomination, from the weak king to the weak father of a family; they are all eager to crush reason; yet always assert that they usurp its throne only to be useful.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
But the days of true heroism are over, when a citizen fought for his country like a Fabricius or a Washington, and then returned to his farm to let his virtuous fervour run in a more placid, but not less salutary, stream.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world!
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
The little respect paid to chastity in the male world is, I am persuaded, the grand source of many of the physical and moral evils that torment mankind, as well as of the vices and follies that degrade and destroy women; yet, at school, boys infallibly lose that decent bashfulness, which might have ripened into modesty at home.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
It is time to effect a revolution in female manners – time to restore to them their lost dignity – and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Gracious Creator of the whole human race! hast thou created such a being as woman, who can trace thy wisdom in thy works, and feel that thou alone art by thy nature, exalted above her-for no better purpose? Can she believe that she was only made to submit to man her equal; a being, who, like her, was sent into the world to acquire virtue? Can she consent to be occupied merely to please him; merely to adorn the earth, when her soul is capable of rising to thee? And can she rest supinely dependent on man for reason, when she ought to mount with him the arduous steeps of knowledge?
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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