1792-1822, British Poet
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
Percy Bysshe Shelley – [Goodness]
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 – [Love]
All of us, who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.
Percy Bysshe Shelley – [Self-improvement]
All things are sold: the very light of heaven is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love, the smallest and most despicable things that lurk in the abysses of the deep, all objects of our life, even life itself, and the poor pittance which the laws allow of liberty, the fellowship of man, those duties which his heart of human love should urge him to perform instinctively, are bought and sold as in a public mart of not disguising selfishness, that sets on each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign.
Percy Bysshe Shelley – [Money]
Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality.
Percy Bysshe Shelley – [Chastity]
Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
Percy Bysshe Shelley – [Hope]
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 – [Economy and Economics]
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 – [Argument]
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 – [Fidelity]
Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley – [Death and Dying]
Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
Percy Bysshe Shelley – [Familiarity]
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 – [Government]
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 – [Death and Dying]
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 – [Christians and Christianity]
How wonderful is death! Death and his brother sleep.
Percy Bysshe Shelley – [Death and Dying]
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 – [Religion]
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 – [Compatibility]
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 – [Theater]
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 – [Generosity]
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 – [Vegetarianism]