“Solitude and reflection are necessary to give to wishes the force of passions.”
More from Mary Wollstonecraft on Philosophy
“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.”
“What is there in our nature that is for ever urging us on towards pain and misery?”
“How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?”
“Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose-a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.”
“It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.”
“I do not wish women to have power over men but over themselves.”
“In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century.”
“If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test.”
“Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.”
“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.”
Others on Philosophy
Ludwig Wittgenstein
22 quotes“The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.”
Christopher Hitchens
22 quotes“How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of...”
Nietzsche
22 quotes“One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior.”
Carl Jung
21 quotes“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
Immanuel Kant
20 quotes“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”
Heraclitus
19 quotes“All things flow nothing abides.”
H. L. Mencken
17 quotes“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
C.S. Lewis
15 quotes“[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
14 quotes“Consciousness is man's greatest misfortune, still I know that man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfaction...”
Samuel Beckett
14 quotes“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
Napoleon
14 quotes“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”
Isaac Asimov
13 quotes“Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.”