Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelleywas one of the major English Romantic poets, and is regarded by some as among the finest lyric, as well as epic, poets in the English language. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not see fame during his lifetime, but recognition for his poetry grew steadily following his death. Shelley was a key member of a close circle of visionary poets and writers that included Lord Byron; Leigh...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth4 August 1792
jesus philosophy example
The emptiness and folly of retaliation are apparent from every example which can be brought forward. Not only Jesus Christ, but the most eminent professors of every sect of philosophy, have reasoned against this futile superstition.
men practice mind
The practice of utter sincerity towards other men would avail to no good end, if they were incapable of practising it towards their own minds. In fact, truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.
philosophy causes adequate
It is vain philosophy that supposes more causes than are exactly adequate to explain the phenomena of things.
wise names mind
Oh, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle Such lamps within the dome of this dim world That the pale name of priest might shrink and dwindle Into the Hell from which it first was furled.
sweet pain
Love's very pain is sweet
loss wrath evil
The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath of God and the loss of everlasting life, admits of no other explanation than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet.
joy
I have drunken deep of joy...
moving thinking imagination
We live and move and think; but we are not the creators of our own origin and existence. We are not the arbiters of every motion of our own complicated nature; we are not the masters of our own imaginations and moods of mental being.
pain evil heaven
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.
mind variation humans
The thoughts which the word "God" suggests to the human mind are susceptible of as many variations as human minds themselves.
scylla anarchy rich
The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism.
men command-not soul
Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; the subject, not the citizen... The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
lying flower years
The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying, And the Year On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead, Is lying. . . .
together divides
No more let life divide what death can join together.