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
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
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
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
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
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Poetry
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
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
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
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, Vulgarity, Profanity
Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Love
Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Economics, Economy
The soul’s joy lies in doing.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Joy, Happiness, Action
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: Repentance, Youth
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Life
To be omnipotent but friendless is to reign.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Leaders, Leadership
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
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
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: Self-Control, Greatness & Great Things, Discipline
When the power of imparting joy is equal to the will, the human soul requires no other heaven.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Joy
A dream has power to poison sleep.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Dreams
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
Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Knowledge, Familiarity
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
To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night
To defy power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, it to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This alone is life, you, empire and victory.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Living, Hope
Kings are like stars—they rise and set,
they have the worship of the world, but no repose.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Work
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: Christianity, Christians
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
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: Grief, Bereavement, Grieving
He has outsoared the shadow of our night; envy and calumny and hate and pain, and that unrest which men miscall delight, can touch him not and torture not again; from the contagion of the world’s slow stain, he is secure.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Dying, Death
All of us, who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth. – Shelley, Percy Bysshe
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Topics: Improvement, Self-improvement, Progress
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