Browse 6 quotations connecting Mary Wollstonecraft with Learning, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Sources represented here include Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
“Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.”
Education enlarges judgment and weakens obedience based only on power, making intellectual development a condition of genuine independence.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Wollstonecraft argues that deliberately narrowing women’s education preserves dependence and obedience.
“To become respectable, the exercise of their understanding is necessary; there is no other foundation for independence of character.”
Independent character is presented as something built through trained understanding, not granted by status, appearance or approval.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; the statement immediately precedes Wollstonecraft’s insistence on reason rather than opinion as authority.
“I wish them to be taught to think.”
Education should produce independent judgment rather than polished imitation, so the ability to think becomes more important than accumulating accomplishments for display.
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), “MORAL DISCIPLINE,” beginning on printed page 22, Project Gutenberg #67466. “I wish them to be taught to think” follows Wollstonecraft’s recommendation that children compare similar and different ideas; the sentence continues into the next printed page and remains historical educational reform argument.
“Judicious books enlarge the mind and improve the heart.”
Good reading can develop both judgment and moral feeling, making intellectual enlargement and character formation parts of the same educational process.
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), “READING,” printed page 49, Project Gutenberg #67466. “Judicious books enlarge the mind and improve the heart” appears in Wollstonecraft’s case for carefully chosen reading that joins intellectual cultivation with moral formation; the passage remains historical educational and conduct writing.
“It is reflection which forms habits, and fixes principles indelibly on the heart.”
Habit formation becomes stronger when action is joined with reflection, because principles understood and revisited are more likely to guide later choices.
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), “THE BENEFITS WHICH ARISE FROM DISAPPOINTMENTS,” printed page 111, Project Gutenberg #67466. Wollstonecraft says reflection forms habits and fixes principles while opening a religious-moral discussion of disappointment, self-examination and character.
“Reading is the most rational employment, if people seek food for the understanding.”
Reading is valuable when it feeds judgment and understanding rather than becoming a performance of remembering words without examining their ideas.
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), “READING,” printed page 49, Project Gutenberg #67466. Wollstonecraft calls reading the most rational employment when people seek food for the understanding, contrasting reflective reading with merely collecting words or quotations; this is eighteenth-century educational argument rather than a current evidence-based teaching prescription.
