“They are the men of fancy, the favourites of the sex, who outwardly respect, and inwardly despise the weak creatures whom they thus sport with.”

Men of genius and talents have started out of a class, in which women have never yet been placed.

Some women govern their husbands without degrading themselves, because intellect will always govern.

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?

Only by the jostlings of equality can we form a just opinion of ourselves.

Men, indeed, appear to me to act in a very unphilosophical manner when they try to secure the good conduct of women by attempting to keep them always in a state of childhood.

Like the flowers that are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty.

The greater number of people take their opinions on trust, to avoid the trouble of exercising their own minds, and these indolent beings naturally adhere to the letter, rather than the spirit of a law, divine or human.

I never wanted but your heart-that gone, you have nothing more to give.

They may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent.

Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable – and life is more than a dream.

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.

How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?

She would stand and behold the waves rolling, and think of the voice that could still the tumultuous deep.

Every glance afforded colouring for the picture she was delineating on her heart.

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.

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

Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years.

The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun.

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

One cannot hire a hand – the whole man always comes with it.

Man is a mistake. He must go.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe.

When I attained a certain advanced intimacy with a man, and I don’t just mean sex, I married him.