Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley (English Poet)

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

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

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