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
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: Profanity, Swearing, Vulgarity
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
To be omnipotent but friendless is to reign.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Leadership, Leaders
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: Ignorance, Friend, World, Envy, Kind, Friends
I love snow, snow, and all the forms of radiant frost.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Snow
Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Dying, Death
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
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
Kings are like stars—they rise and set,
they have the worship of the world, but no repose.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Work
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: Seasons, Autumn, Harmony
I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Religion
Man’s yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Change
When the power of imparting joy is equal to the will, the human soul requires no other heaven.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Joy
Contemporary criticism only represents the amount of ignorance genius has to contend with.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Criticism
The soul’s joy lies in doing.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Joy, Action, Happiness
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
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
Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Knowledge, Familiarity
War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight, The lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: War
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
Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Selfishness
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
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
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
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
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Poets, Poetry
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: Seasons, Time
It is not a merit to tolerate, but rather a crime to be intolerant.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
How wonderful is death! Death and his brother sleep.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Death, Dying
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- William Wordsworth English Poet
- Algernon Charles Swinburne English Poet
- William Blake English Poet
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge English Poet
- John Gay English Poet, Dramatist
- Edwin Arnold English Poet
- Bernard Mandeville British Writer
- Edmund Spenser English Poet
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning English Poet
- John Milton English Poet
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