Here are the 83 best handpicked quotes from “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley:
From quotes by The Monster to quotes by Victor Frankenstein to quotes by Dr. Waldman
So if you want the best quotes from “Frankenstein” sorted by figure, then you’re in the right place.
Let’s get started!
My Favorite “Frankenstein” Quote
#1
“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
— Victor Frankenstein
As they say, nothing is constant except change, but even with that knowledge, why do we still feel strange, uncomfortable, and at times, even afraid of it?
For someone who aims for stability, this quote resonates with me and got me thinking about the recent sudden shifts in my life that rendered me unstable, restless, and even anxious of what’s to come.
It is a real struggle to cope with sudden changes in our lives, whether that’s on the things or people we value the most, but this also gives us a chance to know how resourceful we can get to not just conquer but also thrive in the midst of these changes.
29 Quotes by The Monster
#2
“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. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling, but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death — a state which I feared yet did not understand.”
— The Monster
#3
“As I read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar, yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read, and to whose conversation I was a listener. I sympathized with, and partly understood them, but I was unformed in mind, I was dependent on none, and related to none . . . and there was none to lament my annihilation . . . what did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.”
— The Monster
#4
“Plutarch taught me high thoughts; he elevated me above the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to admire and love the heroes of past ages. Many things I read surpassed my understanding and experience. I had a very confused knowledge of kingdoms, wide extents of country, mighty rivers, and boundless seas. This book developed new and mightier scenes of action. I read of men concerned in public affairs, governing or massacring their species. I felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice.”
— The Monster
#5
“Hateful day when I received life!’ I exclaimed in agony. ‘Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemlance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.’”
— The Monster
#6
“I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow-creatures were, high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these acquisitions; but without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profit of the chosen few. And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant; but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endowed with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they, and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded their’s. When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?”
— The Monster
#7
“My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine.”
— The Monster
#8
“The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.”
— The Monster
#9
“Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was. I cherished hope, it is true, but it vanished when I beheld my person reflected in water or my shadow in the moonshine, even as that frail image and that inconstant shade.”
— The Monster
#10
“These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle, and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased, and I turned away with disgust and loathing.”
— The Monster
#11
“Here then I retreated, and lay down, happy to have found a shelter, however miserable, from the inclemency of the season, and still more from the barbarity of man.”
— The Monster
#12
“I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”
— The Monster
#13
“Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!”
— The Monster
#14
“I allowed my thoughts, unchecked by reason, to ramble in the fields of Paradise, and dared to fancy amiable and lovely creatures sympathizing with my feelings and cheering you gloom…But it was all a dream: no Eve soothed my sorrows nor shared my thoughts; I was alone.”
— The Monster
#15
“My reign is not yet over… you live, and my power is complete. Follow me; I seek the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost to which I am impassive. You will find near this place, if you follow not too tardily, a dead hare; eat and be refreshed. Come on, my enemy; we have yet to wrestle for our lives; but many hard and miserable hours must you endure until that period shall arrive.”
— The Monster
#16
“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
— The Monster
#17
“I asked, it is true, for greater treasures than a little food or rest: I required kindness and sympathy; but I did not believe myself utterly unworthy of it.”
— The Monster
#18
“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel…”
— The Monster
#19
“Polluted by crimes, and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?”
— The Monster
#20
“I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived, and long for the moment when these hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination will haunt my thoughts no more.”
— The Monster
#21
“Do not despair. To be friendless is indeed to be unfortunate, but the hearts of men, when unprejudiced by any obvious self-interest, are full of brotherly love and charity.”
— The Monster
#22
“Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed?”
— The Monster
#23
“One as deformed and horrible as myself, could not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects… with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being…”
— The Monster
#24
“But soon,” he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pyre triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.”
— The Monster
#25
“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!”
— The Monster
#26
“It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”
— The Monster
#27
“If I have no ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion; the love of another will destroy the cause of my crimes, and I shall become a thing of whose existence every one will be ignorant. My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to the chain of existence and events, from which I am now excluded.”
— The Monster
#28
“Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master;–obey!”
— The Monster
#29
“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
— The Monster
#30
“I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books. They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection.”
— The Monster
38 Quotes by Victor Frankenstein
#31
“… the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#32
“Did you not call this a glorious expedition? and wherefore was it glorious? not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror, because at every new incident your fortitude was to be called forth and your courage exhibited, because danger and death surrounded it, and these you were brave to overcome. for this was it a glorious , for this was it an honorable undertaking.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#33
“I shunned the face of man; all sound of joy or complacency was torture to me; solitude was my only consolation—deep, dark, death-like solitude.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#34
“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.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#35
“But her’s was the misery of innocence, which, like a cloud that passes over the fair moon, for a while hides, but cannot tarnish its brightness.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#36
“Oh! Be men, or be more than men. Be steady to your purposes and firm as a rock. This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts may be; it is mutable and cannot withstand you if you say that it shall not. Do not return to your families with the stigma of disgrace marked on your brows. Return as heroes who have fought and conquered, and who know not what it is to turn their backs on the foe.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#37
“The summer months passed while I was thus engaged, heart and soul, in one pursuit. It was a most beautiful season; never did the fields bestow a more plentiful harvest or the vines yield a more luxuriant vintage, but my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#38
“When happy, inanimate nature had the power of bestowing on me the most delightful sensations.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#39
“I contemplated the lake; the waters were placid, all around was calm and the snowy mountains… the calm and heavenly scene restored me and I continued my journey toward Geneva.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#40
“The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#41
“I expected this reception. All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#42
“Devil, do you dare approach me? and do you not fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head?”
— Victor Frankenstein
#43
“The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine.“
— Victor Frankenstein
#44
“It was very different when the masters of science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#45
“My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy; I exclaimed, “Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#46
“I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#47
“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 his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#48
“I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy, and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#49
“With how many things are we on the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#50
“None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#51
“One man’s life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought, for the dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#52
“But he found that a traveller’s life is one that includes much pain amidst its enjoyments. His feelings are for ever on the stretch; and when he begins to sink into repose, he finds himself obliged to quit that on which he rests in pleasure for something new, which again engages his attention, and which also he forsakes for other novelties.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#53
“I enjoyed this scene; and yet my enjoyment was embittered both by the memory of the past, and the anticipation of the future. I was formed for peaceful happiness. During my youthful days discontent never visited my mind; and if I was ever overcome by ennui, the sight of what is beautiful in nature, or the study of what is excellent and sublime in the productions of man, could always interest my heart, and communicate elasticity to my spirits. But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit, what I shall soon cease to be — a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others, and abhorrent to myself.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#54
“My feelings became calmer, if it may be called calmness when the violence of rage sinks into the depths of despair.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#55
“I feel pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#56
“The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#57
“I agree with you,” replied the stranger; “we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves — such a friend ought to be — do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures. I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship. You have hope, and the world before you, and have no cause for despair. But I — I have lost everything, and cannot begin life anew.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#58
“We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep. We rise; one wandering thought pollutes the day. We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep, embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away; it is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow, the path of departure still is free. Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow; nought may endure but mutability!”
— Victor Frankenstein
#59
“I looked upon the sea, it was to be my grave.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#60
“How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!”
— Victor Frankenstein
#61
“The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#62
“Alas! Why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#63
“The sight of the awful and majestic in nature had indeed always the effect of solemnising my mind and causing me to forget the passing cares of life.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#64
“The cup of life was poisoned for ever; and although the sun shone upon me, as upon the happy and gay of heart, I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#65
“…take me where I may forget myself, my existence, and all the world.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#66
“Man,” I cried, “how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom!”
— Victor Frankenstein
#67
“Anguish and despair had penetrated into the core of my heart; I bore a hell within me, which nothing could extinguish.”
— Victor Frankenstein
#68
“My life, as it passes thus, was indeed hateful to me, and it was during sleep alone that I could taste joy. O blessed sleep!”
— Victor Frankenstein
5 Quotes by Elizabeth Lavenza
#69
“When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?”
— Elizabeth Lavenza
#70
“If I see but one smile on your lips when we meet, occasioned by this or any other exertion of mine, I shall need no other happiness.”
— Elizabeth Lavenza
#71
“But now misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood.”
— Elizabeth Lavenza
#72
“When one creature is murdered, another is immediately deprived of life in a slow torturing manner; then the executioners, their hands yet reeking with the blood of innocence, believe that they have done a great deed.”
— Elizabeth Lavenza
#73
“It may…be judged indecent in me to come forward on this occasion; but when I see a fellow-creature about to perish through the cowardice of her pretended friends, I wish to be allowed to speak, that I may say what I know of her character.”
— Elizabeth Lavenza
3 Quotes by Alphonse Frankenstein
#74
“Enter the house of mourning, my friend, but with kindness and affection for those who love you, and not with hatred for your enemies.”
— Alphonse Frankenstein
#75
“Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived.”
— Alphonse Frankenstein
#76
“…is it not a duty to the survivors that we should refrain from augmenting their unhappiness by an appearance of immoderate grief? It is also a duty owed to yourself; for excessive sorrow prevents improvement or enjoyment, or even the discharge of daily usefulness, without which no man is fit for society.”
— Alphonse Frankenstein
1 Quote by Dr. Waldman
#77
“A man would make but a very sorry chemist if he attended to that department of human knowledge alone.”
— Dr. Waldman
6 Quotes by Robert Walton
#78
“So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein—more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.”
— Robert Walton
#79
“My life might have been passed in ease and luxury, but I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path. Oh, that some encouraging voice would answer in the affirmative! My courage and my resolution is firm; but my hopes fluctuate, and my spirits are often depressed. I am about to proceed on a long and difficult voyage, the emergencies of which will demand all my fortitude: I am required not only to raise the spirits of others, but sometimes to sustain my own, when theirs are failing.”
— Robert Walton
#80
“I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.”
— Robert Walton
#81
“My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading.”
— Robert Walton
#82
“Nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose- a point on which the soul can focus its intellectual eye.”
— Robert Walton
#83
“Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.”
— Robert Walton