Mary Astell

Every Body has so good an Opinion of their own Understanding as to think their own way the best.

Your glass will not do you half so much service as a serious reflection on your own minds.

Upon the principles of reason, the good of many is preferable to the good of a few or of one; a lasting good is to be preferred before a temporary, the public before the private.

Women need not take up with mean things, since (if they are not wanting to themselves) they are capable of the best.

God is His own Design and End, and that there is no other Worthy of Him.

If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?

Hitherto I have courted Truth with a kind of Romantick Passion, in spite of all Difficulties and Discouragements: for knowledge is thought so unnecessary an Accomplishment for a Woman, that few will give themselves the Trouble to assist us in the Attainment of it.

For certainly there cannot be a higher pleasure than to think that we love and are beloved by the most amiable and best Being.

The Relation we bear to the Wisdom of the Father, the Son of His Love, gives us indeed a dignity which otherwise we have no pretence to. It makes us something, something considerable even in God's Eyes.

The Soul debases her self, when she sets her affections on any thing but her creator.

The design of Rhetoric is to remove those Prejudices that lie in the way of Truth, to Reduce the Passions to the Government of Reasons; to place our Subject in a Right Light, and excite our Hearers to a due consideration of it.

If a Woman can neither Love nor Honour, she does ill in promising to Obey.