Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was an English poet. A leading figure of the Romantic Movement, he was known for his radical political and religious views.
Born in Sussex and educated at Eton, Shelley was expelled from Oxford for his polemical The Necessity of Atheism (1811,) which proclaimed his defiance of orthodoxy.
Shelley’s philosophical poem Queen Mab (1813) records his harangues against kings, priests, statesmen, marriage, commerce, and Christianity. His other notable works include Prometheus Unbound (1820,) a philosophical verse drama, Epipsychidion (1821,) a daring moral attack on marriage, and, Adonais (1821,) an elegy on the death of John Keats.
A sailing accident off the coast of Italy abruptly ended Shelley’s life.
Shelley’s second wife was Mary Shelley, author of the Gothic horror novel Frankenstein (1818,) and daughter of the writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Mild is the slow necessity of death;
The tranquil spirit fails beneath its grasp,
Without a groan, almost without a fear,
Resigned in peace to the necessity;
Calm as a voyager to some distant land,
And full of wonder, full of hope as he.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Death
It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Generosity
I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Life
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal. Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood by all, but which the wise, and great, and good interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Mountains, Nature
It is impossible that had Buonaparte descended from a race of vegetable feeders that he could have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the throne of the Bourbons.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Vegetarianism
Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Romance, Kiss
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep—he hath awakened from the dream of life—‘Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Bereavement, Grieving, Grief
Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Past, Moving on, Reflection, Future
When the power of imparting joy is equal to the will, the human soul requires no other heaven.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Joy
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another s; if we feel, we would that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood. This is Love.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
There was no corn—in the wide market-place all loathliest things, even human flesh, was sold; They weighed it in small scales—and many a face was fixed in eager horror then; his gold the miser brought; the tender maid, grown bold through hunger, bared her scorned charms in vain.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Food
There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Autumn, Harmony, Seasons
Man’s yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Change
What are numbers knit
By force or custom? Man who man would be,
Must rule the empire of himself; in it
Must be supreme, establishing his throne
On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy
Of hopes and fears, being himself alone.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Self-Control, Discipline
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: The Future, Inspiration, Future
Here I swear, and as I break my oath may eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge. Oh, how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon; to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again—I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Christians, Christianity
The Galilean is not a favorite of mine. So far from owing him any thanks for his favor, I cannot avoid confessing that I owe a secret grudge to his carpentership.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Christianity
In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Theater
The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Fashion, Dress
It is not a merit to tolerate, but rather a crime to be intolerant.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
All of us who are worth anything spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Youth, Repentance
A sensitive plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
and closed them beneath the kisses of night.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Light
Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Marriage
Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Hope
It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Vegetarianism
The soul’s joy lies in doing.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Action, Happiness, Joy
Life may change, but it may fly not; Hope may vanish, but can die not; Truth be veiled, but still it burneth; Love repulsed,—but it returneth.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Change
January gray is here, like a sexton by her grave; February bears the bier, march with grief doth howl and rave, and April weeps—but, O ye hours! Follow with May’s fairest flowers.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Time, Seasons
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