Quotes by Shelley, Percy Bysshe




Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 July 8, 1822) was one of the major English romantic poets and is esteemed by some scholars the finest lyric poet in the English language. He is perhaps most widely famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy; but his major works were long visionary poems such as Adonais and Prometheus Unbound. Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism made him a notorious and much denigrated figure in his own life, but he became the idol of the following two or three generations of poets (including the major Victorian poets Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats.) He was also famous for his association with contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron, and, like them, for his untimely death at a young age. He was married to the famous novelist Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein..

"Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on change    Share


"Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on chastity    Share

"In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on theater    Share

"Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on tragedies
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"It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower -- and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on translation    Share

"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..."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on tyranny    Share

"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."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on vegetarianism    Share

"War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on war    Share

"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."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on wealth    Share

"O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?"

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on winter
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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."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on criticism    Share

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Shelley, Percy Bysshe - 93px-Portrait_of_Percy_Bysshe_Shelley_by_Curran_1819.jpeg - Portrait by Amelia Curran, 1819   Photos >>