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Argument & Debate
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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
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Change
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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
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Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Chastity
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Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Christianity
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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
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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
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Criticism
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Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Death
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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, The Daemon of the World
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How wonderful is death! Death and his brother sleep.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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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
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Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Economics
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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
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Fashion
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The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Food
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There was no corn -- in the wide market-place all loathliest things, even human flesh, was sold; They weighed it in small scales -- and many a face was fixed in eager horror then; his gold the miser brought; the tender maid, grown bold through hunger, bared her scorned charms in vain.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Forgiveness
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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
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Future, The
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The gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Generosity
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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
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Goodness
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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
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Government
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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
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Greatness & Great Things
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...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
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Grief, Grieving
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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
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Happiness
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The soul's joy lies in doing.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Hope
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Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Imagination
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The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Infinity
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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, Letter, January 3, 1811
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Books by and about Percy Bysshe Shelley