It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.

— Mary Wollstonecraft

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, then by my example, how dangerous is the pursuit of knowledge and how much happier is that man who believes his native town to be the world than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.

— Mary Wollstonecraft

Let their faculties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength, and then determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual scale.

— Mary Wollstonecraft

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

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

Make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives; - that is, if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers.

— Mary Wollstonecraft

Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.

— Mary Wollstonecraft

Nature in everything demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom violate them with impunity.

— Mary Wollstonecraft

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.

— Mary Wollstonecraft

Solitude and reflection are necessary to give to wish the force of passions.

— Mary Wollstonecraft