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
I love snow, snow, and all the forms of radiant frost.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Snow
O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Future, Difficulty, Seasons, Winter, Hope
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Poets, Poetry
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
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
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Imagination, Goodness
Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, all that vain men imagine or believe, or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, we descanted.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Argument
All love is sweet, Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever. They who inspire is most are fortunate, As I am now: but those who feel it most Are happier still.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Love
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
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
Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Familiarity, Knowledge
Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life… is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Swearing, Profanity, Vulgarity
Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Government
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
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Poetry
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes what’er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,
A mechanized automaton.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Power
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Music, Adversity
The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Study, Learning
Kings are like stars—they rise and set,
they have the worship of the world, but no repose.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Work
The soul’s joy lies in doing.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Happiness, Joy, Action
Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the heights of love’s rare universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire—
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Love
When the power of imparting joy is equal to the will, the human soul requires no other heaven.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Joy
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Inspiration, Future, The Future
I know the past, and thence I will essay to glean a warning for the future, so that man may profit by his errors, and derive experience from his folly.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Past, Experience
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
Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Romance, Kiss
Nothing in the world is single; all things by law divine in one spirit mix and mingle. Why not I with thine?
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were as scarlet, they are now white as snow: they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer, Time.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Forgiveness
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
The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Wealth, Luxury
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: Nature, Mountains
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
Obedience indeed is only the pitiful and cowardly egotism of him who thinks that he can do something better than reason.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Obedience
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
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
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Life
War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight, The lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: War
Among true and real friends, all is common; and were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friend.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: World, Friend, Kind, Ignorance, Envy, Friends
There is no real wealth but the labor of man.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Labor
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
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