Top 400 Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “I love all waste and solitary places.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

202. “Words are but holy as the deeds they cover.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

203. “In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

204. “Necessity, thou mother of the world!”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

205. “It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed for all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

206. “I have drunken deep of joy...”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

207. “Whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

208. “The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

209. “Persevere even though Hell and destruction should yawn beneath your feet.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

210. “War is a kind of superstition, the pageantry of arms and badges corrupts the imagination of men.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

211. “In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

212. “The thoughts which the word “God” suggests to the human mind are susceptible of as many variations as human minds themselves.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

213. “No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

214. “That sweet sleep which medicines all pain.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

215. “I cannot endure the horror, the evil, which comes to self in solitude.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

216. “Jesus Christ opposed with earnest eloquence the panic fears and hateful superstitions which have enslaved mankind for ages.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

217. “Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

218. “We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practice; we.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

219. “I had rather not have any more of my hopes and illusions mocked by sad realities.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

220. “Hence in solitude, or that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

221. “It is vain philosophy that supposes more causes than are exactly adequate to explain the phenomena of things.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

222. “There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet, and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

223. “If a person’s religious ideas correspond not with your own, love him nevertheless.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

224. “Love’s Pestilence, and her slow dogs of war.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

225. “What! alive, and so bold, O earth?”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

226. “Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

227. “War, waged from whatever motive, extinguishes the sentiment of reason and justice in the mind.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

228. “Man resembles no carnivorous animal.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

229. “His lips in truth-entangling lines which smiled he lie his tongue disdained to speak.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

230. “This lake exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

231. “All love is sweet Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

232. “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

233. “Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

234. “Sing again, with your dear voice revealing. A tone Of some world far from ours, where music and moonlight and feeling are one.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

235. “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

236. “The breath Of accusation kills an innocent name, And leaves for lame acquittal the poor life, Which is a mask without it.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

237. “For love and beauty and delight, there is no death nor change.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

238. “But Greece and her foundations are Built below the tide of war, Based on the crystalline sea Of thought and its eternity; Her citizens, imperial spirits, Rule the present from the past, On all this world of men inherits Their seal is set.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

239. “Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know, but leech-like to their fainting country cling, till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, – a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field...”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Featured in: Country Quotes

240. “First our pleasures die – and then our hopes, and then our fears – and when these are dead, the debt is due dust claims dust – and we die too.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

241. “What is Freedom? ye can tell That which slavery is, too well For its very name has grown To an echo of your own.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

242. “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

243. “As I lay asleep in Italy There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me To walk in the visions of Poesy.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

244. “I love Love – though he has wings, And like light can flee, But above all other things, Spirit, I love thee – Thou art love and life! Oh come, Make once more my heart thy home.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

245. “Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

246. “Ere Babylon was dust, The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden, That apparition, sole of men, he saw.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

247. “If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

248. “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

249. “Let me set my mournful ditty To a merry measure; Thou wilt never come for pity, Thou wilt come for pleasure; Pity then will cut away Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

250. “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