“Recommend to your children virtues, that alone can make them happy, not gold.”
Source: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948), p. 14
The monster to Robert Walton
Frankenstein (1818)
Context: I seek not a fellow feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone while my sufferings shall endure; when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; 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.
Source: On the documentary Ruben Blades Is Not My Name in "Inside Ruben Blades: New Documentary Showcases the Man Behind the Music" https://afropop.org/articles/inside-ruben-blades-new-documentary-showcases-the-man-behind-the-music in Afropop Worldwide (2018 Apr 10)
Source: Notes of Thought (1883), p. 147
History of My Life (trans. Trask 1967), 1997 reprint, v. 8, chapter 4, p. 94
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