Miranda’s Reviews > Frankenstein: The 1818 Text > Status Update

“It is not pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your malignity is withdrawn from your power.”

“Seek happiness in tranquility, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.”

“Even where the affections are not strongly moved by any superior excellence, the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds, which hardly any later friend can obtain.”

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”

“How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have if life even in the excess of misery!”

“Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock,”

“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.”

Science fiction turned to mystery 👀

“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 possible mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.”

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