Men become cannibals of their own hearts; remorse, regret, and restless impatience usurp the place of more wholesome feeling: every thing seems better than that which is.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on how negative emotions can consume one's better feelings, leading to a perceived need for something different than one's current situation.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's quote delves into the darker aspects of human emotions, illustrating how feelings of remorse, regret, and impatience can overshadow positive sentiments. It suggests that these negative emotions are so potent that they can drive individuals to retract from their own hearts and desires, creating a longing for a better state of being that might not align with reality. The metaphor of becoming 'cannibals' implies a self-destructive behavior where one's true emotions are devoured by these 'wholesome' feelings that now feel out of reach.
In practice
In discussions about mental health, this quote can highlight the impact of negative feelings.
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place be afforded; it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.
The instructor can scarcely give sensibility where it is essentially wanting, nor talent to the unpercipient block. But he can cultivate and direct the affections of the pupil, who puts forth, as a parasite, tendrils by which to cling, not knowing to what - to a supporter or a destroyer.
What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.
I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.
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.
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.' - Frankenstein
People always say 'Etta, you know what your problem is? You're neither fish nor fowl. There is no place to rack you.' When I would go in a record shop, you might find one or two records by me in different stacks.
I cannot in all conscience agree to anyone being sent to the gallows. God alone can take life because He alone gives it . . .
The word 'tolerance' once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate.
We all wish to live. We all seek a world in which men are freed of the burdens of ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease. And we shall all be hard-pressed to escape the deadly rain of nuclear fall-out should catastrophe overtake us.
While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.
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