Top 400 Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “In proportion as a man is selfish, so far has he receded from the motive which constitutes virtue.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

352. “O’er Egypt’s land of memory floods are level, And they are thine, O Nile! and well thou knowest The soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil, And fruits, and poisons spring where’er thou flowest.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

354. “Reading does not occupy me enough: the only relief I find springs from the composition of poetry, which necessitates contemplations that lift me above the stormy mist of sensations which are my habitual place of abode. I have lately been composing a poem on Keats; it is better than anything I have yet written and worthy both of him and of me.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

355. “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

356. “The great community of mankind had been subdivided into ten thousand communities, each organized for the ruin of the other.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

358. “The crime of inquiry is one which religion never has forgiven.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

359. “From the moment that a man is a soldier, he becomes a slave. He is taught obedience; his will is no longer, which is the most sacred prerogative of man, guided by his own judgment. He is taught to despise human life and human suffering; this is the universal distinction of slaves.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

360. “Yes! all is past – swift time has fled away, Yet its swell pauses on my sickening mind; How long will horror nerve this frame of clay? I’m dead, and lingers yet my soul behind.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

362. “And bid them love each other and be blest: And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves, And come and be my guest, – for I am Love’s.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

363. “All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. ‘The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’ But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

364. “Every fanatic or enemy of virtue is not at liberty to misrepresent the greatest geniuses and most heroic defenders of all that is valuable in this mortal world.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

366. “Within my heart is the lamp of love, And that is day!”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

367. “For this is the most civil sort of lie That can be given to a man’s face. I now Say what I think.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

368. “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

369. “Of Planets, struggling fierce towards heaven’s free wilderness.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

370. “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

371. “Think ye by gazing on each other’s eyes To multiply your lovely selves?”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

372. “I am not much of a hand at love songs, you see I mingle metaphysics with even this, but perhaps in this age of Philosophy that may be excused.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

373. “The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

374. “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed !”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

376. “Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

377. “Equality in possessions must be the last result of the utmost refinements of civilization; it is one of the conditions of that system of society towards which, with whatever hope of ultimate success, it is our duty to tend.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

378. “Confound the subtlety of lawyers with the subtlety of the law.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

379. “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

380. “So is Hope Changed for Despair-one laid upon the shelf, We take the other. Under heaven’s high cope Fortune is god-all you endure and do Depends on circumstance as much as you.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

382. “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

383. “This is Heaven, when pain and evil cease, and when the Benignant Principle, untrammelled and uncontrolled, visits in the fulness of its power the universal frame of things.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

384. “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

385. “The intense atom glows A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

386. “One nightingale in an interfluous wood Satiate the hungry dark with melody.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

387. “The conceptions which any nation or individual entertains of the God of its popular worship may be inferred from their own actions and opinions, which are the subjects of their approbation among their fellow-men.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

388. “The discussion of any subject is a right that you have brought into the world with your heart and tongue. Resign your heart’s blood before you part with this inestimable privilege of man.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

389. “It belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather than confound.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

390. “Before we aspire after theoretical perfection in the amelioration of our political state, it is necessary that we possess those advantages which we have been cheated of, and which the experience of modern times has proved that nations even under the present conditions are susceptible.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

391. “The person who has been accustomed to subdue men by force will be less inclined to the trouble of convincing or persuading them.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

392. “Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other’s hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate’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

393. “Toward whatsoever we regard as perfect, undoubtedly, it is no less our duty than it is our nature to press forward; this is the generous enthusiasm which accomplishes not indeed the consummation after which it aspires, but one which approaches it in a degree far nearer than if the whole powers had not been developed by a delusion. It is in politics rather than in religion that faith is meritorious.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

394. “I think one is always in love with something or other; the error – and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it – consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

395. “Man resembles no carnivorous animal.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

396. “O Spirit! fearlessly bear on. Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk, Though frosts may blight the freshness of its bloom, Yet spring’s awakening breath will woo the earth To feed with kindliest dews its favorite flower, That blooms in mossy bank and darksome glens, Lighting the greenwood with its sunny smile.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

397. “Let the advocate of animal food force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and, as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth, and plunging his head into its vitals, slake his thirst with the streaming blood; when fresh from the deed of horror, let him revert to the irresistible instincts of nature that would rise in judgment against it, and say ‘Nature formed me for such work as this. Then, and then only, would he be consistent.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

398. “And, day and night, aloof, from the high towers and terraces, the Earth and Ocean seem to sleep in one another’s arms, and dream of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all that we read in their smiles, and call reality.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

399. “Yet if thou wilt, as ’tis destiny of trodden worms to writhe till they are dead, put forth thy might.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

400. “He will embrace a pure system, from its abstract truth, its beauty, its simplicity, and its promise of wide-extended benefit; unless custom has turned poison into food, he will hate the brutal pleasures of the chase by instinct; it will be a contemplation full of horror and disappointment to his mind, that beings capable of the gentlest and most admirable sympathies should take delight in the death-pangs and last convulsions of dying animals.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley